Mailing List Archive

Commas, parentheses etc. at the end of URLs
Phase III changed the handling of free-standing URLs: if the last
letter of the URL is a period, comma, semicolon or parenthesis, it is
taken to be part of the URL. I think this should be changed back to
the Phase II behavior.

I entered this before as a feature request, and I just learned that
Brion also favors the change. Lee argues that the current behavior is
correct.

I say that the goal is not formal correctness, but user satisfaction.
URLs almost never end in one of these special symbols, but when used
as part of Enlish sentences, they are often followed by one of them.
Numerous links all over Wikipedia have been broken by this change.
Just one example: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/BryceHarrington.

Axel