[Ti] Why do URL's die when wrapped?

[Deborah Shadovitz]

On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 03:09 PM, Bill Reburn wrote:
>> Maybe there is some guru level trick for the purpose of posting a url 
>> in
>> email and forcing that line to not break? I don't think so..

On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 07:23 AM, Tom Warner replied:
> This could be an old husband's tale... but I've been told that if you 
> put the url inside these little goodies:
>  <url.goes.here>
> that wrapped links will still work.

It's not an old anyone's tale. It's really the protocol. To back what 
someone else said here, here's some more about it.

The brackets around a URL are "instructions." They are part of the URL 
format specification (RFC 1738) and are to differentiate URL's from 
other things around them. The <> help the mail client (or whatever) to 
find the true start & end of the URL and ignore the line break as the 
start/end of URL."

Regardless of how your particular email program handles web addresses 
for you, it's best to consider that a convenience and still wrap your 
URLs (and other internet addresses) in <> to enable all who read your 
mail to be able to either click the address as a functioning link or to 
copy the address and paste it without extra work.

 From the W3C itself, in a search for "RFC 1738":
<http://www.w3.org/Addressing/>
and
<http://www.w3.org/Addressing/rfc1738.txt> where it says:
APPENDIX: Recommendations for URLs in Context
    In some cases, it will be necessary to distinguish URLs from other
    possible data structures in a syntactic structure. In this case, is
    recommended that URLs be preceeded with a prefix consisting of the
    characters "URL:". For example, this prefix may be used to
    distinguish URLs from other kinds of URIs.

    In addition, there are many occasions when URLs are included in other
    kinds of text; examples include electronic mail, USENET news
    messages, or printed on paper. In such cases, it is convenient to
    have a separate syntactic wrapper that delimits the URL and separates
    it from the rest of the text, and in particular from punctuation
    marks that might be mistaken for part of the URL. For this purpose,
    is recommended that angle brackets ("<" and ">"), along with the
    prefix "URL:", be used to delimit the boundaries of the URL.  This
    wrapper does not form part of the URL and should not be used in
    contexts in which delimiters are already specified.

- - - - -
Deborah Shadovitz, Author, Instructor & Speaker
Adobe Certified Training Provider & GoLive ACE
<http://www.shadovitz.com> ~ <deb at shadovitz.com>
MacAddict Contributing Editor, O'Reilly Network author, Mac Design 
Columnist