Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
That seems to be a growing consensus. The remaining
questions,
then, are the exact details. Exactly which characters do we want
to consider "punctuation", and under what circumstances? My
suggestion is this: After parsing URLs the way it does now, if the
URL ends with one, and exactly one, of the characters period, comma,
question mark, or exclamation; then remove that character and
assume it punctuates the sentence. Otherwise, leave the URL alone.
There's also the endings ".)", "?)", "!)", and
"...".
Getting too complicated? I agree.
So the rule should be a string of *any* length at the end of a URL
consisting of characters that (should shouldn't be hard to determine)
aren't commonly used to end a URL.
Annoying if you want to site <http://www.com/page.html?secretcode=*%.)?!@>?
Yes, but that's going to be an extremely rare occurrence,
and anybody that does that will know that they have a weird little URL
and will check the <Preview> if they're not a fool.
In contrast, everybody and their mother is going to write
"(For more information, see
http://www.com/moreinfo.html.)"quot;,
at least while they're newbies.
-- Toby Bartels
<toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu>