Thanks for the links. BTW, the trailing ">" you are inserting is getting caught in HN's automatic linking and being inserted into the <A> tag.

RFC1738 - Uniform Resource Locators (URL) - recommends use of angle brackets in its "Recommendations for URLs in Context" appendix; when URLs are embedded in text.

<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt>;

Sure, but HN mangles the links. If this was email it might make more sense - or if HN's auto-parsing code were changed.

This is the Internet.

It's filled with pedants.

Some of us are even RFC-compliant.