Angle brackets and URLs

charlie (apparently) - 06:11am Feb 10, 2006 PST
via email

Good morning,

In Glenn Fleishman's article "The Incredible Shrinking URL" he states:

    Although it's not part of the URL specification, using angle
    brackets to protect URLs in email and Usenet news has long been
    recommended by the W3C

    <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08412>

Which URL specification is he referring to? The RFC 2396 "Uniform Resource
Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax" certainly includes angle brackets as part of
the spec.

    <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt>

Specifically it states:

    In practice, URI are delimited in a variety of ways, but usually
    within double-quotes "http://test.com/", angle brackets
    <http://test.com/>, or just using whitespace.

And:

    Using <> angle brackets around each URI is especially recommended
    as a delimiting style for URI that contain whitespace.
   
So, it doesn't say only angle brackets are accepted, but it certainly suggests
and encourages using them as part of the standard.

Similar comments are made in the older RFC 1738:

    <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt>

Anyway, like most/all readers here, I strongly encourage people to use angle
brackets for URLs, especially in newsletters and other business correspondence.
I can't count the number of times I've had a 404 error page simply because
clicking a link also grabbed the period at the end of a sentence; easily avoided
by 'quoting' the URL properly.


[I added that bit, and in both cases, the angle brackets are recommendations, not requirements, as the headings of the sections in which they're discussed make clear. -Adam]


--
   Charlie Garrison <garrisonzeta.org.au>
   PO Box 141, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia