Re: [PATCH] *.man: Break URIs at points specified by the Chicago Style

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi, Ralph,

At 2021-10-23T10:46:32+0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Branden,
> 
> >     But in fact, trailing slashes on URIs are semantically
> >     significant[1]
> ...
> > [1] 
> > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5948659/when-should-i-use-a-trailing-slash-in-my-url/
> 
> StackOverflow isn't an authority.

It was useful enough for my purpose at the time.  I'll remember for my
next discussion with you that you require primary sources, not
literature reviews.  :-O

> Trailing slashes are not always significant.  There is no semantic
> difference between these two.
> 
>     https://example.com
>     https://example.com/
> 
> The difference comes if the slash is at the end of the path component,
> so these two are different.
> 
>     https://example.com/foo
>     https://example.com/foo/

That's what I was referring to.  I didn't want to spend time in the
groff man pages in semantic dissection of UR{I,L}s.

> When just the domain name is needed, I omit the needless slash as it's
> clutter.

Do you think we should instruct readers of our man pages to follow your
example?

> (Please consider turning off hyphenation and justification when
> producing text to paste; I like MANOPT='--nh --nj'.)

I don't format pages from my groff working tree with man because it's
harder to test my changes to page text and macro packages, among other
things, that way.  But I'll see about making a "test-groff -man" wrapper
suitable for this purpose.

[...]
>         .UR http://\:example\:.com/\:fb8afcfbaebc74e\:.cc
[...]
> I think that's too prescriptive.  The example may split at
> 
>                                      http://
>     example.com/fb8afcfbaebc74e.cc
>                               http://example
>     .com/fb8afcfbaebc74e.cc
>                          http://example.com/
>     fb8afcfbaebc74e.cc
>           http://example.com/fb8afcfbaebc74e
>     .cc
> 
> A small suffix probably shouldn't be marked as a place to split.
> I think there's judgement by the author and the text should just
> advise.

It does--that's why I used the word "recommend".  But I have further
softened the language[1].  The thrust of my observations is that _if_
people break adjacently to slashes or dots in a URI, they should follow
our[2] advice about which sides of these characters to do it on.

They can always eschew breaking altogether, and in fact I've just made
it less painful to do practice such abstinence.[3]

Regards,
Branden

[1] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=0a111a916ee344d5046e244dcc95b4d3f49c352d
[2] well, "my"--but I persuaded Alex, at least :D
[3] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=c7efb5fd40aae5293d9de87092b7a4b2be89df91

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