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

[Drew Adams]

> >> 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.
>
> No, I think this would be a mistake.  We're still talking only about URLs
> independently from their target.  Liveness of a URL target is a property
> that is difficult/impossible to ascertain and can change at any moment.
> I don't want `browse-url' to ignore "http://www.iro.umontreal.ca"; under
> point just because I'm currently not connected to the internet or
> because it
> is temporarily down, and neither do I want it to wait for a timeout before
> deciding it.
>
> The difference we want to talk about instead is between something that
> heuristically is likely to be meant as a URL and something which
> may be used
> as a URL but doesn't particularly "look like a URL".

That's OK too. I thought people were asking for the ability to get only
"valid" URLs in the sense of having live targets. Isn't that what the
initial request was for?

In any case, let's at least be able to get any syntactically valid URL, and
preferably as the default behavior.