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

[Drew Adams]

> Stefan gets my idea right. It is definitely not about aliveness.

Fine. So what is the heuristic to use to recognize something that "is likely
to be meant as a URL"? Presence of a URL scheme (e.g. http://, ftp://)?
Presence of a URL scheme or "www." (e.g. www.whatever.anything)? There are
already regexps defined to recognize URLs, with and without schemes. How
should they be used or modified?

And what to return when probably-intended-URL recognition fails? nil?
Whatever is currently at point, without prepending http://? Should http://
ever be prepended (e.g. if "www." satisfies the test for likely URL, as in
www.google.com)?

Let's stop being so vague and go beyond saying things like (1) just DTRT and
(2) we'll have a heuristic that recognizes TRT. Which value do you want
returned for which text at point? And what heuristic do you propose to use
to recognize a likely URL intention?

The only difficult problem seen so far is knowing what is being requested.
It's not an alligator. It's bigger than a breadbox. It doesn't contain
chlorophyll. OK, so what is it?