This question on a list for net marketing people:

A bit of a pedantic grammar question here. When writing sentences for web pages that contain a URL or email address at the end should the sentence finish with a full stop or not. The approach taken seems to vary on the sites I've reviewed.

stimulated a fair amount of discussion, including this comment:

Frivolous bastardisation of our punctuation is one of the key witnesses to the current decline of our wonderful nation.

(He might have been joking, of course).

The consensus, though, seemed to be more with this response to the anti-frivolous bastardisation person:

straight from the telegraph comment pages!

utter nonsense of course. what works on the page doesn't necessarily work on screen. simple as that. punctuation which doesn't follow 'the rules' but makes screen text easier to read is fine by me and would be fine by most people reading it. being a pedant doesn't help sell stuff!

I can't help noticing the violation of the 'no exclamation marks' rule though ;-) !