On 25-Feb-06, at 7:07 AM, Benoit Gagnon wrote:
On Feb 25, 2006, at 3:55 AM, Eric Coleman wrote:
Not to hijack the thread or anything, but the way you formatted your email, did you do that on your own? I.e. the links.
Oh, this is all manual work :) I got inspired by the Markdown syntax, DaringFireball website and other messages from this very list, but I believe it is a pretty common practice. I think it's a great presentational technique both for the writer and the reader. I will generally put all the [x] marks in the text as I write, then go on a quest to actually fetch the URLs for those links. ...
I think I first noticed this notation in the Gentoo Linux weekly newsletter. My linux box has been neglected since I got my Mac, but I used to use mutt[1] (console mail client) for reading mail. Mutt also likes to KISS and pipes the messages to urlview[2] which is a small app to show you a numbered list of all the links in the message and launch your browser when you make selections. When the [xx] numbers match up with urlview's numbers (that is, _every_ link has to be numbered in the message) it makes it easy to find the link you want to visit out of the 30+ links in the newsletter (type the link # and enter). Seems to be a pretty useful convention. I have no clue where it started though.
[1] http://www.mutt.org [2] http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/urlview