A good question but one that is likely to get the wrong answer.
People do what works for them, not what the spec might say
And this is exactly how it should be. People should not be slaves of
machines and people should not be slaves of 'standards' either.
The angle braces proposal was a typically clueless one in the first
place. It does not make the problem of identifying a URL any easier.
Like many proposals at the time it was foisted on the Web community by
unilateral decree by people who knew how to work the IETF better.
Another example of cluelessness being the whole URI/URL/URN fiasco that
has caused nothing but confusion ever since.
The strong consensus of users is that cut and paste should work for URLs
in email clients. Blame the lazyness of the email client providers, not
the users.
If you want to persuade a billion people to behave in a particular way
you need to have a better communication plan than Appendix C of STD 66,
an identifier that sounds more like a bilogical classification for
herpes than best user practices for the Web.
But rather than try to improve the communications strategy in this case
a much better plan would be to consider what the most important thing to
tell the billion users of the Internet. I really do not think that would
be how to cut and paste URLs so that they work with MUTT. Not getting
involved with money mover or package reshipping rings is a much bigger
communication priority for me.
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of
michael(_dot_)dillon(_at_)bt(_dot_)com
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 11:33 AM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: AMS - IETF Press Release
Speaking of the IETF eating its own dogfood, is there a reason why
people write things like this?
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?
ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080212005014&newsLang=en
Or use services like this?
http://tinyurl.com/37qjnd
Rather than following the advice of Appendix C in RFC 3986 which
recommends putting angle brackets around URLs like so?
<http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news
_view&newsId=20080212005014&newsLang=en>
I generally type <> left-arrow and then paste the URL between them.
In some environments it even works for non-standard URLs like
<\\SomeServer\Some Folder Name\Engineering\Joe Bloe\Important
Spreadsheet.xls> or <file:Q:\Engineering\Joe Bloe\Important
Spreadsheet.xls>
--Michael Dillon
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