RE: Period at the end of a link or not?

["Will Sansbury" <wsansbury -at- alpha -dot- ipswitch -dot- com>]

Yikes! I wonder how many of us will be fired for clicking on Joyce's
xxx-dot-com links without thinking. ;-)

But yes, Joyce, you're right. Adding a period to the end of a URL will more
often than not break the link. One alternative I've seen, which I believe
dates back to the early days of the web, is to enclose the URL in angle
brackets, like this:
Please see <http://www.willsansbury.com>. 

Personally, I avoid visible URLs if the final output supports hyperlinks.
I'd must rather write "Please see _my Web site_." (with "my Web site"
linked, of course). 

Will Sansbury





 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> techwr-l-bounces+wsansbury=alpha -dot- ipswitch -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- c
> om 
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+wsansbury=alpha -dot- ipswitch -dot- com -at- lists -dot- te
> chwr-l.com] On Behalf Of J Wermont
> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 4:32 PM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: Re: Period at the end of a link or not?
> 
> SB wrote:
> 
>  > We are writing a "Getting Started Guide". There are a 
> couple of sentences  > with long links: i.e., to download 
> XYZ, you can do it from here (of couse we  > don't write here 
> because it is a pdf and because we want the user to see the  
> > path even if it is long).
>  >
>  > My colleague thinks it should have a period at the end of 
> the link to make  > it a sentence and to be grammatically 
> correct. Is this truly a grammatical  > sentence? Here is an 
> example. Period or no period?
> 
> Wouldn't adding a period at the end of a link change the 
> link, and make it invalid? That is, isn't
> 
>    http://www.xxx.com/blah 
> 
> different from
> 
>    http://www.xxx.com/blah.
> 
> ? When the browser tries to load the latter, it would get a 
> 404 error, I would think.
> 
> Joyce
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