That doesn't work as a text message.

If you are in a situation where you can only receive messages via text, then you aren't able to visit web pages.

So they could replace the urls with "[url]" or somesuch when sending them via SMS.

Mobile phones can do both. Not all phones are connected to the internet all the time, so it would make sense to receive twitter messages using SMS, and then connect to the net.

Well, for most everybody it does, actually (sending back-to-back SMSes). Maybe some providers/phones don't implement these things properly, but these are specific situations which should be handled in a different way.

I like Twitter's character limit for shaping the communication, but URLs shouldn't be included in the character count. Ideally, the receiver should send their short message with an HTML link, and Twitter should figure out what to do with that based on the receiver's capabilities and preferences.

That may include sending the full HTML, a bit.ly version, dropping it altogether, or breaking it up into multiple SMSes. If you're using SMS with Twitter, then they have your cell phone number and (thus) know your provider, so this isn't a monumental task.

This all makes me wonder: if you have an SMS enabled phone which is capable of following URLs in a browser, can't Twitter just SMS you a link to the full tweet (HTML links and all)? If not, just fucking drop the URLs since they're useless anyway.

Do people actually use SMS with Twitter any more?