style for including URLs in email
usually i write my emails so that any embedded URLs, like this:
http://www.pcwebopedia.com/TERM/U/URL.html
have a blank line above and below to provide easy extraction, especially if the URL wraps or is followed by punctuation. but for a week or so now i have been watching the traffic on www-style [1], and i’ve discovered a different approach that i like.
rather than breaking up the flow of a paragraph as i did above, people include a number in square brackets that refers to a URL with the same number at the bottom of the email.
what’s strange is that i can’t find any real tech savvy online references that mention this style. i’m not sure if this is just a social custom that people on the list have picked up, but in any event i thought i would record it here for posterity and conversation.
–justin
I noticed this when Textile (http://textism.com/tools/textile/) picked up steam – so maybe a review of semantic markup can help with a history of footnoting links.
And, problem with footnoting seems to break validation. Here’s one blog entry about that: http://www.jclark.org/weblog/WebDev/Blosxom/irony.html.
Justin, are you famous?! Have you ever noticed how many times your photos have been viewed? Good heavens! I linked to your page and your cookie recipie today.
hmm, and yet the end goal of the textile shorthand is to generate the html code of a bonafide footnote. in a heavily text-only favored medium like email, the shorthand wins out.
melanie, i’m known in some parts. :)
Lynx uses the [x] & footnote style if you use the -dump option.
hmm but lynx is primarily for web browsing, right?