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%)