Re: Groff macro to make .UR and .UE links clickable in PDF?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

B 9 wrote on Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 11:59:32PM -0700:

> Since you had such excellent suggestions, I'd like your advice about
> something I've noticed: printed materials often omit the protocol when
> it is "https://"; or "http://";. That makes sense to me and I am
> inclined to change the way the .URL macro in the WWW package works so
> it does the same (when no link text is specified).
> 
> For example,
> 
>     .URL https://foo.bar.com/fred/juki/
> 
> would be displayed (in PDF, HTML, and nroff) as simply
> 
>     foo.bar.com/fred/juki/
> 
> Steve, what do you think of this practice?
> 
> Everyone: Would anyone object if .URL used this strategy for cleaner
> typesetting?

Yes, i do strongly object.

I think it is very bad practice to omit the protocol from an URI.
For one thing, it results in invalid URI syntax.  On top of that,
the fact that this week, the web is a monoculture of https:// neither
means that other protocols don't exist nor that other protocols
cannot become used.  Oh wait, i think i have occasionally seen URIs
like rsync:// and git:// and imaps:// even amid the prevalent
monoculture.  Besides, the distinction between http:// and https://
can occasionally be meaningful.  And finally, the omission of the
protocol can - depending on the context - cause confusion because
it removes an obvious indicator that the thing printed is a URI in
the first place, an indicator that the document author may have
relied on.

I hate the malpractice of omitting the protocol even in browser
software (e.g. in the address bar and in similar places).  It treats
the users as stupid animals who cannot understand proper URI syntax.
It is insulting.

> Note that in the rare cases where someone needed to
> emphasize the protocol, they could simply repeat the URL a second time
> as the link text.
> 
>     .URL  https://foo.bar.com/fred/juki/  https://foo.bar.com/fred/juki/
> 
> would be displayed as
> 
>     https://foo.bar.com/fred/juki/

You propose to break the rendering of existing documents for
absolutely no benefit:  authors who want to join the malpractice
of omitting the protocol are already perfectly free to do so by
writing:

        .URL foo.bar.com/fred/juki

Consequently, we have to assume that those who provided syntactically
correct URIs in their documents did so...  on purpose.

Yours,
  Ingo