Re: TECH: URLs, part deux

On Sun, 30 Sep 2007 14:00:48 -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>The problem is that angle brackets insulate the url from other
>characters that are much more likely to be interpreted as part of the
>URL, such as a period when the URL ends a sentence or a comma when
>it's part of an inline list.  IME " <http://foo.bar>. "  Is more
>likely to be interpreted correctly than " http://foo.bar. ".
True also IME.

>    Perhaps as a compromise we could put spaces before the >'s?  Or
>would that yield trailing spaces (in the form of %20's) in the URL?
As Kelly just noted, I don't think whitespace is ever parsed as a part of an
URL by ... well whatever is the common term for message-rendering things
such as this or bulletin boards or webmail. My preference has been to always
leave whitespace between an URL and punctuation, which may be
typographically non-standard, but works.

>  And I don't suppose we have a path through which to request that the
>listserv software be fixed (or upgraded to an already-fixed version,
>maybe)?
Brown University is using v15, which appears to be the newest version.
Listserv being commercial software, fix requests could have to be addressed
directly to LSoft (.com), but as non-customers, we probably wouldn't have
much leverage. listmaint@brown.edu might be a better place to ask; and
perhaps they could even fix it themselves if we're convincing enuff... Then
again, is anyone on the list studying at or or faculty of Brown any more? If
not, drawing attention to us might even get us kicked off for leeching their
bandwidth :o

John Vertical