[Doc-SIG] What counts as a url?

[Edward D. Loper]

So I'm working on adding HREFs to STminus.  They look like this::

    "anchor name":URL

Where URL is either a relative URL or an absolute URL..  So I went
and looked up "RFC 2396":http://www.w3.org/Addressing/rfc2396.txt .
It suggests (if I'm reading it correctly) that we could define
a URL as::

    ([a-zA-Z0-9-_.!~*'();/?:@&=+$,#] | %[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F])+

Should we use that regexp for URLs?  Or perhaps we should go for
simplicitly, and say that the regexp ends at whitespace::

    [^\s]+

In either case, we'll have to be careful to say::

    See "this":http://url .

instead of::

    See "this":http://url.

(the '.' gets included in the second url).  Is that a problem?  If
so, what can we do about it? (Keep in mind that it *is* acceptable
to have a URL that ends in a '.')..  

Of course, I don't think people will be including HREFs in their
documentation much, anyway.. So the main issue for most people
will just be that they can't use '":' in certain environments..

Ideas/thoughts?

-Edward