Re: [boost] What is it with boost and tinyurl?

From: Daryle Walker (darylew_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-07-23 04:11:37

On 7/21/04 3:46 PM, "Miro Jurisic" <macdev_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> In article <40FE1975.3090809_at_[hidden]>,
> Rene Rivera <grafik.list_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
>>> Finally, URL line wrapping is a well-understood problem, with a recommended
>>> practice (namely, enclosing URLs in text inside <>, as I did above) codified
>>> in the current URL RFC. Every email and usenet client I am aware of does the
>>> right thing with line-wrapped URLs in angle brackets.
>> 
>> Obviously not true for your own client: MT-NewsWatcher/3.4 (PPC Mac OS X). Or
>> perhaps it's my client, Mozilla Thunderbird, not reading it correctly. But
>> certainly two common programs.
> 
> My client DTRT, but from reports throughout this thread, it sounds like
> Mozilla is broken in this regard, which is very sad.

>From the readings here, I think more clients are broken than handle this
correctly.  (My client, MS Entourage X, also got the original poster's URL
wrong.)

> For those of you interested in getting this class of bugs fixed in your
> newsreaders and mail clients, please file bugs referring to appendix of RFC
> 1738, which states:
> 
> "
> 
> [...]  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.

I think the original poster forgot the "URL:" part.

> [...]
> 
> In some cases, extra whitespace (spaces, linebreaks, tabs, etc.) may need to
> be added to break long URLs across lines.  The whitespace should be ignored
> when extracting the URL.
> 
> "

The problem isn't the white space.  The real problem is that the character
that ends an URL bracketing is the same as the usual line quoting character
(">").  Unless your client is _really_ smart, multi-line URLs get cut off at
the beginning of their second line.

> Given the feedback here, I am less adamantly against tinyurl, although I would
> still prefer to avoid it (but that's easy for me, because my client works :-)
> )

-- 
Daryle Walker
Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie
darylew AT hotmail DOT com