long line warning & URLs

long line warning & URLs

[Ami Fischman]

Hi there,

I like that message warns me when I'm about to post a message with lines
that are too long.  However, I wish it would NOT ask me about lines that
are only too long b/c there's a long (google groups, most likely) URL
involved.  Does it seem like a good idea to people to change the
"long-lines" syntax check to ignore URL lines?

Cheers,
-- 
  Ami Fischman
  usenet@fischman.org

Re: long line warning & URLs

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Ami Fischman <usenet@fischman.org> writes:

> I like that message warns me when I'm about to post a message with lines
> that are too long.  However, I wish it would NOT ask me about lines that
> are only too long b/c there's a long (google groups, most likely) URL
> involved.  Does it seem like a good idea to people to change the
> "long-lines" syntax check to ignore URL lines?

Then you'd have to be able to recognize URLs reliably.  :-)

Theoretically, if you wrap the URLs in <URL: ...>, you can insert as
much white space as you want, but that only works in a not-too-big
number of news readers. 

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: long line warning & URLs

[Niklas Morberg]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Theoretically, if you wrap the URLs in <URL: ...>, you can
> insert as much white space as you want, but that only
> works in a not-too-big number of news readers.

Another option is to convert the long URIs to shorter ones.
<URL:http://makeashorterlink.com/about.php> is one available
service, there might be others.

Disadvantages of this solution is that the service might
not be available eternally and it also adds a new point of
failure: if the redirect site goes down you will not be
able to reach the original link.

Niklas

Re: long line warning & URLs

[Martin Thornquist]

[ Niklas Morberg ]

> Another option is to convert the long URIs to shorter ones.
> <URL:http://makeashorterlink.com/about.php> is one available
> service, there might be others.
>
> Disadvantages of this solution is that the service might
> not be available eternally and it also adds a new point of
> failure: if the redirect site goes down you will not be
> able to reach the original link.

A third reason I don't like these services at all is that I like to
see where a link points. Then I can often see if it's a page I know,
among other things.

News articles are more or less eternal due to Google. I have much more
faith that Google is still up and running in ten years than any one of
these shorter link places.


Martin
-- 
"An ideal world is left as an exercise to the reader."
                                                 -Paul Graham, On Lisp