Wrap links in email notifications with spaces

[azurelunatic]

Title:
Wrap links in email notifications with spaces

Area:
email notifications, getting along with everybody's tech

Summary:
When a planned link appears in a notification, add spaces fore and aft before inserting punctuation.

Description:
The format for the top part of a plain text comment notification currently goes kind of like this:

displayed name (username) replied to a comment you left in a Dreamwidth entry "title" (http://exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/12345.html).

Notice how the link to the entry is wrapped in parentheses, with no space between the closing parenthesis and the end of the link.

I have a charming little palmtop that bravely tries to autolink things found in its email. It's so adorable, and it tries so hard. It thinks that trailing punctuation in a link (like commas, parentheses) is part of the link. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose email client does this. When I visit the link, Dreamwidth doesn't quite know what to do with the parenthesis at the end of the link, and throws an error page.

Things that contribute to the problem:
* The punctuation being stuck next to the link (under DW's control with some monkeying with possibly translation strings)
* My email client making a choice that's wrong under these circumstances (under ... probably Palm's ... control; also under the control of the email clients of other affected users.)
* Dreamwidth's server getting confused by links ending in ".html)" -- as well as ".htm" and ".html,". (possibly under DW's control, possibly also a serious-server-guts thing)

To make things nicer for the people whose email clients do this, what about putting a space between the end of any link that's supposed to be in a plain text email notification, and any punctuation or other characters that follow after?

The same comment notification, with this change, would look like so:

displayed name (username) replied to a comment you left in a Dreamwidth entry "title" ( http://exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/12345.html ).

This should not apply to links within the entry or comment, because there are some links that *do* have punctuation as part of the link (Wikipedia, I'm looking at you!). But when the link is part of the notification template, it should be relatively easy to put a space in between the link and any punctuation. This could cause weird line wrapping, but I would personally find weird line wrapping preferable to weird linking.

Might also be good to have some weird link issues handled better server-side (try stripping off weird characters at the end of something that throws an error, try the .html version of a page when .htm fails) but the space things sounds a lot easier to do and should save a certain amount of aggravation.

Poll #5023 Wrap links in email notifications with spaces

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 44

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
34 (77.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
4 (9.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (13.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[deborah]

Don't most devices ignore angle brackets wrapped around a link? If the e-mail notification says <http://exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/12345.html>, most clients I've ever seen protect the URL itself.

Although now that I think about that, we have to control for angle brackets getting sent through as raw, and make sure they didn't get escaped. Because I'm pretty sure what I typed above explicitly won't work in an e-mail notification, because I escaped the angle brackets.

Hmm.

[azurelunatic]

Yes, when the email notification for this comment came in, it was cheerfully including > at the end, though gmail was concerned about the semicolon and didn't include that in the link.

[faithofone]

I fear what Thunderbird would do with using angle brackets like that. Often times when people put something Thunderbird thinks is HTML in an email, it disappears from my emails, since I view them in plain text.

[matgb]

I assume you're talking plain text notification? It's not an issue for the HTML formatted emails, but it would annoy me if that were happening, and some of my email clients do similar things.

[azurelunatic]

Yes, this is plain text notification.

[jana]

Oh, this can be very annoying, I know, but I would like it much better if DW would skip the parentheses altogether and instead would change it to,

displayed name (username) replied to a comment you left in a Dreamwidth entry "title". Entry link: http://exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/12345.html

Or simply,

displayed name (username) replied to a comment you left in a Dreamwidth entry "title": http://exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/12345.html

[anaraine]

I'd go for the second one.

[faithofone]

I'd go for either of those, or the original suggestion. I like them all equally.

[fyreharper]

I like this idea, since the awkward line wrapping with the spaces-around-the-parentheses would be likely to bug me.

[solitarywalker]

The standard way to get around this problem is to enclose the link with angle brackets. It'd be great if DW would do that in notification emails.