[Zope3-dev] Final(?) "Safe" Character List

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:27 AM 6/7/02 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>
>I agree. Remind my why () didn't work. Was it just a matter of breaking
magic url 
>detection in email bodies disqualified ()? If so, I'm not sure this is a
strong
>enough reason.

It makes it *really* hard to share URLs with other people, if you can't
just copy-and-paste from the browser, and have it so the recipient can
click on it.  A lot of people can't manage the co-ordination required to
copy-and-paste a URL from a broken e-mail client back into the browser.
Heck, I myself find it extraordinarily inconvenient on the rare occasion
that it happens.

What's interesting is that it's not just a few odd or old e-mail clients.
Damn near *everybody* reported e-mail clients truncating on the first ')'
encountered.

Also, apparently netscape -remote chokes on parentheses also, and
apparently that's used by a lot of Unix environment tools to launch URLs,
so even if the mail/other tool *recognizes* the URL, it won't be able to
launch it.

IMHO, if "distinguished" URLs are going to be useful, they'd better work in
e-mail clients.  I know, I didn't put that requirement on my list a few
days ago, but I didn't think of it until I was about to do the testing and
realized that e-mailing out the URLs for testing would be a test in itself!