I'm sending this to the list instead of directly to Mike, since some
other people could be stubbing toes on this issue, too.

On 21/8/2004, Mike Patterson wrote:
>As Dan Victor reminded folks earlier this evening. Make your
>posts in plain text.

I did. My eudora has been firmly told that if it ever sends out html,
I'll trade it in on pine, and I don't even like pine. I usually put
urls in angle brackets.

Putting a url inside of angle brackets is a (nearly) standard way to
package it in such a way that even if spaces or line wraps get added
during transfer, the url is still clickable for most mail clients. [I
say nearly standard, because the real standard requires URL: at the
beginning. But most if not all versions of outlook barf on the proper
standard, and as far as I know all modern clients understand the
abbreviated form, so it's become common to leave out the specific URL
directive.]

> All the URL's in the following HTML text
>were stripped out of the message as posted on Siler's page where
>I read Tweeters.

Some text-to-html converters can't cope with angle brackets, which need
special handling. That's a problem with the converter, not the input.
It looks like in this case, whatever converter is being used manages
the brackets properly in header lines, but ignores them in the body.
If you look at the html source, my urls are there--but most browsers
won't display _anything_ inside of angle brackets, and sometimes not
even unpaired brackets such as those used for quote marks or less
thans. Ampersands can be similarly troublesome. There are
full-featured converters such as mhonarc that do a sophisticated job of
it, but I can certainly understand someone not wanting to invest the
time it takes to learn how to drive it.

If you read a mailing list on the web (any list, not just this one, and
any web server), there's always going to be the potential for
translation errors.

(Whee, I just saw my second Zale moth for the year, outside the window
this time. Alas, the cats beat me to the first one...)
--
Allyn Weaks allyn at tardigrade.net Seattle, WA Sunset zone 5
Pacific NW Native Wildlife Gardening: http://www.tardigrade.org/natives/
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only
unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American
public." -- Theodore Roosevelt