Angle Bracket URLs

I post a lot of URLs in email, and I use angle brackets to delimit the URL. Then if I need to, I can add punctuation after the URL, like this: < http://peterkaminski.com/ >.

This format is a shortened version of the URL quoting recommended in RFC 1738, "Uniform Resource Locators," which provided for inclusion of URLs in text with punctuation:


 * In addition, there are many occasions when URLs are included in other kinds of text; examples include electronic mail, USENET news messages, or printed on paper. In such cases, it is convenient to have a separate syntactic wrapper that delimits the URL and separates it from the rest of the text, and in particular from punctuation marks that might be mistaken for part of the URL. For this purpose, is recommended that angle brackets ("<" and ">"), along with the prefix "URL:", be used to delimit the boundaries of the URL. This wrapper does not form part of the URL and should not be used in contexts in which delimiters are already specified.

Modern usage drops the "URL:" prefix, but because of RFC 1738, well-behaved programs should ignore the angle brackets when highlighting the URL.

Happily, the angle bracket URL format is included in the MLA, Chicago and CBE citation styles, too.

It is also part of RFC 2369, "The Use of URLs as Meta-Syntax for Core Mail List Commands and their Transport through Message Header Fields."