Call Me Crazy, But Links Should Be Linked

I'm sick of seeing a web page - be it a blog entry, an article, a corporate home page, or otherwise - containing a URL, where the URL is just plain text rather than being a clickable link. The whole point of the web is to be connected via links. Why bother to put a URL on your page, but make it so the user has to copy and paste it into the browser's address field manually?

The most recent example of this that I've seen is in a comment on the latest blog post by the Macalope. Scroll down to the comment by brett_x. There, he provides a URL to a related article on RoughlyDrafted. But the URL is not a clickable link. Furthermore, because of the width constraint of the comment section of that page, the URL wraps to three lines. So to actually follow the link, you need to copy and paste the URL into a text editor, delete the line feed characters to make it one line, then copy and paste that back into your browser's address bar.

I don't know if the blog software for that site allows links in comments, and if it doesn't then that would explain this. The primary reason I can think of not to allow links would be to prevent spam. But the fact that the Macalope's blog requires a login account to post comments seems like enough of a measure to prevent spam, and even if not, spam is most commonly deterred by the use of CAPTCHAs anyway.

So my hypothesis is that people find it to be too much trouble to put in the HTML code necessary to turn a URL into a link. They just paste in the URL and say "done". But there are ways to mitigate this. Most HTML editing and blogging software should have shortcuts that can insert links in a way more convenient than typing the HTML by hand. I like how the forum software at the Joel on Software site does it; you merely have to surround the URL with space characters, and it will automatically become a link in the post. And Blogger, which I'm using to write this post, has an "insert link" button that makes the process painless.

So, this is my plea to everyone out there who ever puts a URL somewhere that it will appear on a web page: please take the extra effort to make it a clickable link. Especially if you want people to actually view the page it points to. That's how the web works, after all.