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

[Mark C. Langston]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:10:11PM -0600, luke wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 09:27 AM, Steve Wozniak wrote:
> 
> > Eudora has built-in facilities (via menus) to remove all return 
> > characters in selected text, removing the word wrap. So you can email 
> > a URL without returns. This helps in some situations. Also, placing 
> > beginning and ending < > brackets around the URL helps with some email 
> > client programs.
> 
> i think it may be that certain email apps wrap the *displayed* text as 
> opposed to some email apps actually wrapping the data content of the 
> emails...   maybe that is where some links are being broken?


Actually, both sender and receiver's MUA may wrap the text, and thus
"break" the link.

For example, I use Mutt as my MUA and vi as my editor.  Both will wrap
text -- vi as I type, and mutt will attempt to limit ilne length (where
"line" is defined as "characters preceding EOL/CR") to something 
sensible before handing it to the MTA for delivery.

This is typically done to avoid the need to wrap lines on the receiving
end.  However, there's no way to tell what a sensible line-length is on
the receiving end; thus, the receiver's MUA may wrap the line to meet
other criteria, such as screen or window size.

Many GUI apps will perform a "non-destructive" wrap.  I.e., they don't
modify the content itself, they merely change the way in which it's
displayed.  Most text-based apps will perform a "destructive" wrap,
inserting a linefeed at the point at which the text is wrapped.  For
example, when I receive an email that requires wrapping in Mutt, the
text is destructively wrapped, and a "+" is inserted as the first
character of the wrapped line, to indicate the change in content.


One should always scrutinize a link before clicking on it, however.
Blindly clicking a link is a dangerous thing.  Make sure it doesn't
look suspicious, it's complete, it's not a link to a site known to
be troublesome for you or contain content you'd rather not see, etc.

-- 
mark at bitshift.org                                       mark at seti.org
Systems & Network Admin                                SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org                               http://www.seti.org