[Doc-SIG] What counts as a url?
Edward D. Loper
edloper@gradient.cis.upenn.edu
Thu, 15 Mar 2001 23:32:10 EST
So I'm working on adding HREFs to STminus. They look like this::
"anchor name":URL
Where URL is either a relative URL or an absolute URL.. So I went
and looked up "RFC 2396":http://www.w3.org/Addressing/rfc2396.txt .
It suggests (if I'm reading it correctly) that we could define
a URL as::
([a-zA-Z0-9-_.!~*'();/?:@&=+$,#] | %[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F])+
Should we use that regexp for URLs? Or perhaps we should go for
simplicitly, and say that the regexp ends at whitespace::
[^\s]+
In either case, we'll have to be careful to say::
See "this":http://url .
instead of::
See "this":http://url.
(the '.' gets included in the second url). Is that a problem? If
so, what can we do about it? (Keep in mind that it *is* acceptable
to have a URL that ends in a '.')..
Of course, I don't think people will be including HREFs in their
documentation much, anyway.. So the main issue for most people
will just be that they can't use '":' in certain environments..
Ideas/thoughts?
-Edward