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

[Dennis Fazio]

--On Wednesday, January 22, 2003 07:09 AM -0800 Bill Reburn 
<bill at pacificcoast.net> wrote:

> Maybe there is some guru level trick for the purpose of posting a url in
> email and forcing that line to not break?

That would depend on your email client. I don't know about Entourage, but 
most modern mail clients should allow "flowed text." The receiving client 
will wrap the message text to fit in the variable width display window.

> I have seen multi line - clickable url's before.. I do not understand the
> technology behind that though.

I believe the standard is to delimit URIs with < and >

This makes it easier for mail clients and word processors to recognize a 
URI. The < and > characters, along with spaces and a few others, are 
excluded from the allowed URI character set.

So, entering a URI as <http://www.apple.com>  is more likely to be 
recognized by a standards-compliant mail client as a true complete URI. If 
you type a carriage return or line break in the middle of the URL, however, 
I believe it will fail since you actually insert a control character in the 
middle of the URI. If you send it with no line breaks and it is long, 
requiring the receiving mail client to wrap it to its display window, it 
should still be clickable because there are no extraneous line break 
characters within the <...> string.

Your best bet when writing or pasting a URI in any mail or text document is 
to put the < > delimiters around it.

I've pasted your ebay URI below with and without delimiters. If all goes 
according to plan, the delimited version, at least, should be clickable 
even though wrapped in your display window. I think this might help us to 
pass URI references on the list a lot more effectively.

<http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cgiurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%
2Fws%2F&krd=1&from=R8&MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&SortProperty=MetaEndSo
rt&query=apple>

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cgiurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2
Fws%2F&krd=1&from=R8&MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&SortProperty=MetaEndSor
t&query=apple

--
Dennis Fazio
dfz at mac.com