Re: @uref doc policy

[Mark Polesky]

Graham Percival wrote:
>> 2) Putting a @uref inside an @example looks better to
>>    Graham in certain situations for some reason.
>
> Reasons
> - 50%: this forces a newline, otherwise URLs can easily
>   run off the right-hand edge of the page.

IMO, a better solution would be to use @/ in @urefs, to
allow (but not force) line breaks at certain places.

> - 20%: it makes the links easier to copy&paste (just
>   select the entire line, instead of hunting around for
>   the character-specific boundaries -- this is a serious
>   issue for people on netbooks)

What about:
  right-click > "copy link address"

(or the equivalent)?  Are there any PDF readers that can't
do this?  Also, the user can always just click on the link
from the PDF reader (to open the URL in the default
browser).  I don't see why anyone would need to select the
individual letters of the URL.

> - 20%: it avoids the problem of punctuation when including
>   URLs in a sentence.  For example, see
>   http://www.google.com/index.html.

How is that even a problem?  IMO, that kind of mistake is
hard to do accidentally in texinfo:
  For example, see @uref{http://google.com/index.html.}

>   Or what if the end of a clause has a
>   http://www.link.example.net/, but the sentence
>   continues?  The grammar can be confusing, and it makes
>   the copy&paste more difficult.

Again, I don't imagine this mistake happening too often in
texinfo.  Furthermore, the URL appears in a different color
than the rest of the sentence (on screen at least), and is
typeset in a fixed-width font.  It's easy to see where the
link ends; and confusing grammar is a separate issue.  The
quality of the grammar depends on the author, not on the
presence of URLs.  Regarding the copy&paste difficulty,
again, why not
  right-click > "copy link address" ?

> - 10%: explicit links in text looks ugly.  (subjective
>   judgement)

Show me one professionally published computer programming
book that keeps URLs out of the paragraphs.  The opposite
seems to be the convention; and how is this ugly?  It keeps
the text flowing, rather than breaking the paragraph into
pieces for every URL.

- Mark