Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know about need, but I often use them for emails. I prefer a plain text email program (so no HTML mail to hide the link), and it's been my experience that many receiving email clients break overly long URLs. So I use Metamark[1], which I have a reasonable trust won't disappear in a week or a month.

I understand that you might not like short URLs in the wild (so to speak), but do you really not follow short links when sent to you from friends or relatives? (And, no, I don't mean short URLs from your aunt that sends you all the "funny You Tube" videos.)

[1] http://metamark.net/ (or http://xrl.us for the short link)

> it's been my experience that many receiving email clients break overly long URLs

I always use the "embed in angle brackets" trick for that--although I don't know how all mail readers render it:

  <http://news.ycombinator.com/>

That convention drives me batty. So much time wasted when trying to copy-and-paste those URLs.

That "convention" is one of the only standards-compliant ways to delimit URLs. Fix your copy-and-paste mechanism.

What standard says <http://news.ycombinator.com/>? The appendix of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt says <URL:http://news.ycombinator.com/>.

Read closer.

"The characters '<' and '>' are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text".

The RFC itself uses "<URL:...>" because it already uses "<...>" for BNF non-terminals, which are much more common than URLs in the RFC.

Enjoy your undeserved upvote :)

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