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Re: Best Practice for linking to documents

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Apr 12, 2011 1:03AM

Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:

> One thing that annoys me as a user is that I am never 100% sure from
> just browing and looking at a link whether I will open the file or get
> a download prompt to download the file to my computer.
> I suppose this may be mostly controlled by IE security settings and
> file type,

It depends on the browser and its settings, on the media type of the data,
possibly the filename suffix too, and on the software installed in the
system. It is unavoidably unpredicable, from an author's point of view at
least. Any note on this by the author is a shot in the dark, sometimes an
educated guess that is mostly correct, but it may really confuse when it
isn't.

> I wish there was a way to make this behavior consistent, or include in
> the link whether the file will automatically open or I will get a file
> download prompt (in general I always prefer the latter,).

An author can (and usually should) indicate the media type of the data, such
as "PDF" (which is surely the most widely understood expression for that
type). He may also use the type attribute in markup, as in
type="application/pdf", to express the same thing in machine-readable form
that browsers may make use of

> Including the word "Dwonload" in the link is also g good practice

Any link can be used as a download link by the user, and any link might open
directly in the browser or in a plugin or external program. So the word
"download" would be misleading. If the link points to a PDF document, then
the odds are that many people wish to download it instead of directly
opening it, but this is implicit in its being PDF, and I don't think there's
any better way to express this than the name "PDF".

> I hate links that expand or move you to a different section of the page
> whre there is an image that you click, which opens up a new site where
> you have to input your email address and there are unlabelled series
> of buttons ... and I am not even exaggerating. :)

And you didn't even mention links that are no links because they rely on
Javascript that might be turned off, or have been poorly written in
Javascript in a manner that does not work on all browsers. Links can cause
many kinds of problems, and some of the problems can be alleviated by
annotations, but there's no agreement on how this should be done. One of the
few areas where there is reasonable uniformity is that links to PDF
documents are followed by the name "PDF" in parentheses or an icon for PDF
or both.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/