Hi, Some time ago I wondered what is the correct way to include
url in the message and then I came accross rfc1738 Which suggests
that they should be written as
<URL:http://www.imc.org/rfc1738>
Btw, the email addresses are suggested to be written as
mailto:<rfc822-addr-spec>
Well, personally I find it more traditional to write then in their
simplest format:
http://www.imc.org/rfc1738 and <rfc822-addr-spec>
But, here are the references if you're as curious as I was...
jari
RFC 1738 Uniform Resource Locators (URL) December 1994
[...]
3.5. MAILTO
The mailto URL scheme is used to designate the Internet mailing
address of an individual or service. No additional information other
than an Internet mailing address is present or implied.
A mailto URL takes the form:
mailto:<rfc822-addr-spec>
where <rfc822-addr-spec> is (the encoding of an) addr-spec, as
specified in RFC 822 [6]. Within mailto URLs, there are no reserved
characters.
Note that the percent sign ("%") is commonly used within RFC 822
addresses and must be encoded.
Unlike many URLs, the mailto scheme does not represent a data object
to be accessed directly; there is no sense in which it designates an
object. It has a different use than the message/external-body type in
MIME.
[...]
APPENDIX: Recommendations for URLs in Context
URIs, including URLs, are intended to be transmitted through
protocols which provide a context for their interpretation.
In some cases, it will be necessary to distinguish URLs from other
possible data structures in a syntactic structure. In this case, is
recommended that URLs be preceeded with a prefix consisting of the
characters "URL:". For example, this prefix may be used to
distinguish URLs from other kinds of URIs.
In addition, there are many occasions when URLs are included in other
kinds of text; examples include electronic mail, USENET news
messages, or printed on paper. In such cases, 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.
In the case where a fragment/anchor identifier is associated with a
URL (following a "#"), the identifier would be placed within the
brackets as well.
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.
No whitespace should be introduced after a hyphen ("-") character.
Because some typesetters and printers may (erroneously) introduce a
hyphen at the end of line when breaking a line, the interpreter of a
URL containing a line break immediately after a hyphen should ignore
all unencoded whitespace around the line break, and should be aware
that the hyphen may or may not actually be part of the URL.
Examples:
Yes, Jim, I found it under <URL:ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/doc;
type=d> but you can probably pick it up from <URL:ftp://ds.in
ternic.net/rfc>. Note the warning in <URL:http://ds.internic.
net/instructions/overview.html#WARNING>.