I'm confused, why are you bothering the discussion with HTML issues? does mIRC interpret HTML in its interface? oh it doesnt? well so who cares if HTML doesnt use < > as a delimiter.
above was posted
Quote:
The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe because they are used as the
delimiters around URLs in free text; the quote mark (""") is used to
delimit URLs in some systems. The character "#" is unsafe and should
always be encoded because it is used in World Wide Web and in other
systems to delimit a URL from a fragment/anchor identifier that might
follow it. The character "%" is unsafe because it is used for
encodings of other characters. Other characters are unsafe because
gateways and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify
such characters. These characters are "{", "}", "|", "\", "^", "~",
"[", "]", and "`".



All of those characters listed cause the same problem in mIRC

If i post a URL like,
{http://www.example.com} and click on it in mIRC it works the way it should
if i post a URL like
[http://www.example.com] and click on it, it works the way it should.


if there is ANY other character besides a space after the delimiter (the RFC defines it as such), it adds that character to the URL string and sends it to the browser (any browser exhibits the same problem)

So, keeping this in mind, lets look at a valid URL
<a href="http://www.example.com">example</a>

Now, first it should be noted that the RFC isnt being followed at all (not that we didnt already know that) because that URL isnt clickable (the URL would be delimited by the "). however if we instead use "http://www.example.com">example

it sends to the browser,
http://www.example.com>example (notice that the " is stripped).
{www.foo.com}bar
<www.foo.com>joe
|www.foo.com|frank
[www.foo.com]tom
"www.foo.com"bar
[www.foo.com];
'www.foo.com';

All cause the exact same problem and all ONLY happen in mIRC.

so again, tell us how this isn't a mIRC problem ?