RE: address@hidden: 23.0.0; (thing-at-point 'url) returns invalid urls]

[Drew Adams]

> >> Would someone please DTRT and ack?
> > There's no problem here and nothing to do. The URLs returned are
> > perfectly valid. See the discussion that followed the original email.
>
> Maybe the docstring (and or behavior) should be adjusted to make the
> distinction clear between "assuming there's a URL at point, return it" and
> "check if there's a URL at point, and if there is, return it".
>
> This is often a somewhat subtle but important difference.  When the user
> does M-x browse-url RET, it makes perfect sense to place as default in the
> minibuffer the best URL we could come up with, even if it doesn't
> look very
> likely to a good one.
>
> OTOH if we create a command which can do two different thing depending on
> whether there's a URL at point, we would want to be much more stringent on
> what we consider as an acceptable "URL at point".

Seconded.

The doc can distinguish between the URL itself being valid (syntactically)
and the URL having a live target. The first is a property of the URL; the
second is a property of its target.