David E. Ross wrote:
On 7/16/2016 12:35 PM, Paul B. Gallagher wrote [in part]:
[snipped]
The chief purpose of the angle brackets is delineation -- to tell the
receiving application "the URL begins here... and ends here." AFAIK they
don't tell it "this is a URL." For that, you need either an HTML message
(which supports hyperlinks), or a receiving application like SeaMonkey
that recognizes URLs and email addresses and makes them clickable. And
yes, including "http://"; does help some apps in their recognition
process. Similarly, many diagnose mail links whenever they see the
character "@" -- this@that will probably be clickable when SM receives
this message.
Actually, the use of the < and > as brackets is for humans. This is so
a human user can tell how much to copy and then paste into a browser's
address area.
That's a side effect. As you may know, a URL can contain one or more
characters that some programs will misparse as the end of the URL, such
as a space or a question mark; conversely, a human may add normal
punctuation, thus: "did you go to http://this.fictional.url.com?"; which
some programs will try to parse as part of the URL. Smarter humans will
avoid this, but as you know not all humans are smart.
Another consideration is that the use of angle brackets prevents most
sending email clients from inserting line wrap characters in the middle
of URLs. Those line breaks cause the receiving email client to parse
only the first chunk as the URL and ignore the rest.
BTW, I've noticed that some smartphone messaging apps will see a link
like <http://this.fictional.url.com> and strip the opening "<" but feed
the closing ">" (sometimes as "%3E") to the browser, causing an error.
The receiving user can fix the problem by stripping the last character
manually, but it's a PITA if they don't know that.
Anyway, the point of plain text is that by definition it doesn't
have hyperlinks. So if you want to guarantee clickability, use
HTML.
That is not necessarily true. About 20 years ago, Eudora Lite
recognized URIs in plain-text messages. On the other hand, AOL's
proprietary E-mail application did not; I do not know if AOL ever
fixed that since I never use AOL.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, that's a function of the /receiving/
email client, not of the message content. The sender cannot know if the
recipient has an email client smart enough to recognize his URL as such.
But even the stupidest email client, if it's capable of parsing HTML,
will understand hyperlinks in an HTML message. That's what I meant by
"guarantee."
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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