I like the footnote style use in our email notifications. It used to be that if you made a nice link with an anchor tag, the url was lost in the email. Also, if you just typed in the url in your post, the web page wouldn't contain a hyperlink, just the url, forcing you to copy and paste to follow it.
So the with the old style, a few of us would have the link text be the same as the href of the anchor like so
https://openacs.org/.
Unfortunately, now when this is done, the footnote syntax, like [2] becomes part of the url, making the link in the email notice break. I know you can go to the bottom of the email and get the real link, but as usual I get annoyed when I see it.
So today I learned that a recommended practice in newsgroups is to surround a url with < and > marks. The same could be done with our email notices. There are several possibilities.
- Search for and delimit any url found in the email body.
This would make urls look like <http://example.com/> if someone just typed in http://example.com/. This covers the case where someone ends a sentence with a url, assuming they didn't mean to have a period at the end. Hyperlinks like I used to use would end up looking like <http://example.com/>[1].
- Delimit the footnote with < and > instead of [ and ], like <3>.
- Delimit the original style of footnote using the same,
like <[4]>.