Forum OpenACS Q&A: Footnotes in Email Notifications

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Posted by Tom Jackson on

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.

  1. 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].
  2. Delimit the footnote with < and > instead of [ and ], like <3>.
  3. Delimit the original style of footnote using the same, like <[4]>.
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Posted by Lars Pind on
Or how about just putting a space before the footnote symbol, so it'll say

http://openacs.org [1]