URLs

Q. Should a sentence that ends with a website address end with a period that is not part of the address? I am concerned that people who are not familiar with how URLs work might have trouble finding a site if they assume that the final period is part of the address. I have the same concern about putting a web address in quotation marks. Have you found any effective way of making sure people will be able to tell website addresses from surrounding punctuation?

A. We have embraced the view that punctuation marks following a URL will be readily enough perceived as belonging to the surrounding text. We do not recommend setting off a URL with angle brackets, which we allowed in the past; for one thing, angle brackets are used in some markup languages (see CMOS 14.17).