Bug 41020

Summary:	KNode handles URLs poorly, not common way
Product:	[Unmaintained] knode	Reporter:	kdebug
Component:	general	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <pim-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	psychonaut
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	openSUSE
OS:	Other
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description kdebug 2002-04-15 06:12:00 UTC

(*** This bug was imported into bugs.kde.org ***)

Package:           knode
Version:           KDE 3.0.0 
Severity:          wishlist
Installed from:    SuSE RPMs
Compiler:          Not Specified
OS:                Not Specified
OS/Compiler notes: Not Specified

Quite often long URLs on usenet are enclosed in angle brackets.  Many newsreaders respect these angle brackets as start and end of url markers.  So a URL like

<http://www.someplace.dom/whatever/
somethingelse/here.jpg>

is interpreted as a single URL.  I know of no "official" standard however it appears to be honored by many newsreaders and due to this is becoming a fairly common practice in discussion groups.

It is common enough so that when someone placed a space after the first bracket many people complained that the link wouldn't work... somebody posted the link again without the space (but still on several lines) and it worked for everybody but myself and one other reader (using Gravity newsreader).

Of course a really nice solution would also to autodetect if a URL is split across many lines.  Reliably detecting that however is not among the most easy tasks. :)

(Submitted via bugs.kde.org)

Comment 1 Tristan Miller 2005-03-15 23:57:55 UTC

Yes, there is an "official" standard for this convention:  RFC 1738.  It is described in the appendix:

APPENDIX: Recommendations for URLs in Context

   URIs, including URLs, are intended to be transmitted through
   protocols which provide a context for their interpretation.

   In some cases, it will be necessary to distinguish URLs from other
   possible data structures in a syntactic structure. In this case, is
   recommended that URLs be preceeded with a prefix consisting of the
   characters "URL:". For example, this prefix may be used to
   distinguish URLs from other kinds of URIs.

   In addition, there are many occasions when URLs are included in other
   kinds of text; examples include electronic mail, USENET news
   messages, or printed on paper. In such cases, it is convenient to
   have a separate syntactic wrapper that delimits the URL and separates
   it from the rest of the text, and in particular from punctuation
   marks that might be mistaken for part of the URL. For this purpose,
   is recommended that angle brackets ("<" and ">"), along with the
   prefix "URL:", be used to delimit the boundaries of the URL.  This
   wrapper does not form part of the URL and should not be used in
   contexts in which delimiters are already specified.

In practice, however, the prefix "URL:" is usually dropped and the angle brackets alone are used.

Anyway, this bug is quite old.  Are such URLs still causing a problem in recent versions of KNode?

Comment 2 Andrew Crouthamel 2018-09-04 18:35:27 UTC

Hello! Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this project has been unmaintained for many years so I am closing this bug.