Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but the fact remains that this is a bug. You may like it broken, but that does not mean it is not broken.
The reason the > and < characters were chosen for URLs delimiters, is that the characters are prohibited within a URL, so parsing them into a URL field, and passing them to a browser is, by definition, a bug.
Your reasoning that < and > are unneccesary except for line breaks is partially correct, but irrelevant. Even if they were never needed, adding them should never break something.
Another reason for the use of < and > is that some punctuation characters, such as the period, ARE allowed in URLs but are also present in common sentences (on IRC as well as in e-mail and news and everyday writing). Use of the correct delimiters will eliminate ambiguous situations where it is not possible to tell if a trailing period is the name of a file or path, or is the end of the sentence containing the URL. Well, they WOULD, if mIRC worked correctly.
But whether you like the style or not is really of no importance. Since they are invalid characters, any correctly functioning URL parsing algorithm MUST stop scanning when it reaches one. It's not about what I need or want or what I can or cannot script (of course I can work around most bugs, but why should I have to?)
Oh, and the style is not limited to news and email. It is also part of the MLA style standard for all scholarly works, and by extension, all knowledgable publications in the English Language. Just a minor point.
