On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 7:21 AM, Chad Etzel <jazzyc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > A more lighthearted discussion to see where people stand on this > convention. > > We all know the convention of prefixing usernames with the @ symbol, > the interesting thing I notice is that different sites (and even > within tiwtter's site itself) decide to link or not link the @ symbol > along with it. Been thinking about this. Not linking the @ sign feels a bit like not linking "http://"; at the beginning of an automatically linked URL. On the other hand, @ is not a protocol, which might be an argument against linking it. But just as some clients automatically link URLs, some clients are already smart enough to create a link to Twitter if they see a word starting with @ and no space after it... though of course the protocol is still HTTP. It is sort of an extended protocol... tells the client the protocol plus the domain. Perhaps it helps to think about a tool that extracts the tagged text from links. Would it make sense to end up with text that omits the @ sign? Not really, so I favor including it. Nick
