A good question but one that is likely to get the wrong answer. People do what works for them, not what the spec might say And this is exactly how it should be. People should not be slaves of machines and people should not be slaves of 'standards' either. The angle braces proposal was a typically clueless one in the first place. It does not make the problem of identifying a URL any easier. Like many proposals at the time it was foisted on the Web community by unilateral decree by people who knew how to work the IETF better. Another example of cluelessness being the whole URI/URL/URN fiasco that has caused nothing but confusion ever since. The strong consensus of users is that cut and paste should work for URLs in email clients. Blame the lazyness of the email client providers, not the users. If you want to persuade a billion people to behave in a particular way you need to have a better communication plan than Appendix C of STD 66, an identifier that sounds more like a bilogical classification for herpes than best user practices for the Web. But rather than try to improve the communications strategy in this case a much better plan would be to consider what the most important thing to tell the billion users of the Internet. I really do not think that would be how to cut and paste URLs so that they work with MUTT. Not getting involved with money mover or package reshipping rings is a much bigger communication priority for me. -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of michael.dillon@xxxxxx Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 11:33 AM To: ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: RE: AMS - IETF Press Release Speaking of the IETF eating its own dogfood, is there a reason why people write things like this? > http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp? > ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080212005014&newsLang=en Or use services like this? > http://tinyurl.com/37qjnd Rather than following the advice of Appendix C in RFC 3986 which recommends putting angle brackets around URLs like so? <http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news _view&newsId=20080212005014&newsLang=en> I generally type <> left-arrow and then paste the URL between them. In some environments it even works for non-standard URLs like <\\SomeServer\Some Folder Name\Engineering\Joe Bloe\Important Spreadsheet.xls> or <file:Q:\Engineering\Joe Bloe\Important Spreadsheet.xls> --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf