[opensuse] Re: URLs in Email

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:

In <4A48C2E6.5090907@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk>, Dave Howorth wrote:

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David C. Rankin wrote:

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http://www.3111skyline.com/download/screenshots/driveTempFailure- ProbabilityDensity.jpg You were complaining about your mail reader breaking URLs into half. One reason is when people forget to format URLs correctly in emails:

How is this:

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<http://www.3111skyline.com/download/screenshots/driveTempFailure-Probabil ityDensity.jpg>

Any more "correct" that just writing the URL out? Specifically, what IETF RFC, W3C recommendation, or IEC, ISO, or IEEE standard specifies this?

RFC 3986, though it was in the predecessor RFC2396 since at least 1998. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3986.html See "Appendix C. Delimiting a URI in Context" and especially "In such cases, it is important to be able to delimit the URI from the rest of the text, and in particular from punctuation marks that might be mistaken for part of the URI. In practice, URIs are delimited in a variety of ways, but usually within double-quotes "http://example.com/", angle brackets http://example.com/, or just by using whitespace: http://example.com/ These wrappers do not form part of the URI. In some cases, extra whitespace (spaces, line-breaks, tabs, etc.) may have to be added to break a long URI across lines. The whitespace should be ignored when the URI is extracted. No whitespace should be introduced after a hyphen ("-") character. Because some typesetters and printers may (erroneously) introduce a hyphen at the end of line when breaking it, the interpreter of a URI containing a line break immediately after a hyphen should ignore all whitespace around the line break and should be aware that the hyphen may or may not actually be part of the URI. Using <> angle brackets around each URI is especially recommended as a delimiting style for a reference that contains embedded whitespace"

I've used "", "<$URL>", and simply "$URL" and none of them give consistently good results. The second is broken just as often as the other two, and some clients stick the trailing '>' in the URL.

As you can see, it is the interpreting MUA that is broken, not the format. The rules for interpretation are pretty clear, I think. I understand M$ out-of-luck is particularly bad. Carlos wrote:

Alpine, for one, knows that it should not wrap a http://someplace URL. And hitting [enter] or click on it more or less works.

Yup, Thunderbird too. Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org