Comment by herodotus

When I worked at Apple I filed a Radar (bug-report) asking for the mail client to check that, if the text of an <a> tag was a url, that the text matched the href field. What followed, on the Radar, was a lengthy debate about this. If I recall correctly, the people who opposed basically argued that, if this feature was implemented by the mail client, spammers would simply find another way to inject false links. We (those who wanted the feature) lost. But I still think that, any web app that shows "http://whatever" in a link field should ensure that the href field is "http://whatever".