Re: @uref doc policy

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:09:24PM -0700, Mark Polesky wrote:
> 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.

You realize that splitting an URL over a linebreak is comparable
to picking your nose in public, right?

> > - 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"

Dude, have you ever tried to use the trackpad on an Aspire One
netbook?  Hitting the right-button without changing the pointer
location is a non-trivial skill to aquire, and after using this
machine for a year, I have yet to master it.

> 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).


Hmm.  I admit that some of my annoyance comes from conference pdfs
which didn't use the \uref{} command in latex, whereas our docs
definitely use it.

xpdf supports links.  I can't figure out how to follow them in gv
(double-clicking an internal link follows it, but doing the same
on an external link seems to take you a random page inside the
same document.  I tried this twice in case I did something weird
with the trackpad).

> > - 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.}

But that looks really weird!  Or does that just make me sound old?

> > - 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?

I don't read programming books, but academic conference and
journal papers relegate all links to footnotes or citations (at
the end of the paper).

> It keeps the text flowing, rather than breaking the paragraph
> into pieces for every URL.

Footnotes do an even better job of this.  :)


What if we said that @example was recommended, but not required?
Honestly, I thought the text "flowed" better with the proposed
changes last email.  But I won't insist on them if you really
prefer your bits of the CG to look that way.  :)

Cheers,
- Graham