On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 10:45:28AM -0800, Brion VIBBER wrote:
The old software knew that 99.9% of the time humans don't _really_ mean it when they put a comma, period, or other such item of punctuation immediately after a URL, but that these are rather intended as, well, punctuation.
The new phase III software trusts us more; URLs that are followed immediately by punctuation (period, comma, paren, semicolon, etc) now include this punctuation in the hyperlink, which leads to a lot of broken external links where URLs are put casually into text, particularly on talk pages.
Bug or feature? You decide!
I would say feature. The parsing rules should be as simple as possible and have as little exceptions as possible. This makes them easier to explain to users, keeps the software simple, and gives less headaches when in the future we want to adapt mark-up or export to other formats such as XML.
-- Jan Hidders