In the comments on StackOverflow, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify> was misparsed to include the trailing angle bracket.  Also there was a semi-colon after it for some reason.  **See my comment below for an example.**

In [RFC 3986 Appendix C. Delimiting a URI in Context][1], three ways are suggested to indicate that a bit of text is a URL.

 1. Angle brackets like `<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify>`
 2. Quotes like `"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify"`
 3. Whitespace like `http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify`

Angle brackets are "especially recommended" in the RFC.

Markdown syntax also [automatically links angle brackets][2] and SO's [editing help mentions it][3].  The [comment formatting help][4] doesn't say comments auto-link differently.  Comments do auto-link, why do it different?

Thanks for looking.  I know free-form URL parsing is a pain, I maintain a library myself.

UPDATE:  As you can see in this example -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify> -- the posting grammar knows how to deal with URLs in angle brackets.  Why not in comments?  They both do auto-linking.  Unless there's some other benefit to the user they should do them the same to avoid confusion.  This allows users to learn just ONE set of quirks, not two.


  [1]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986
  [2]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink
  [3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/editing-help#bare-urls
  [4]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/editing-help#comment-formatting