link format (was Re: Discussion related to Markdown.)

[Aaron VonderHaar]

On 28/10/05, Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com> wrote:

> >   Please visit [http://example.com/some%20dir/ example site].

>

> On the other hand, it's quite ugly. Lots of Wikipedia pages are

> unreadable because of this. And all modern browsers seem to be able to

> deal with URLs with spaces.


Nonetheless, in markdown it would still be incorrect to say

  *[Link](http://example.com/some dir/)

instead of

  [Link](http://example.com/some%20dir/)


Quoting from rfc2396,

"Data corresponding to excluded characters must be escaped in order to
be properly represented within a URI."

...

"The space character is excluded because significant spaces may   
disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URI are
transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of
word-processing programs.  Whitespace is also used to delimit URI in
many contexts."

As it says, using whitespace to delimit URI's is an approved practice :)



I'm curious if end-users would naively use literal spaces within URI's
when they write markdown-processed comments.  Where would they even
find such an URI to copy and paste?, since the spaces should be
encoded in all representations.