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Re: Listing URLs...link the URL text or just the title?

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 10, 2004 4:10PM

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, darrel.austin wrote:

> What would people recommend be the best way to show a list of links to other
> sites:

From one perspective, the description should come first, then the link, so
that linearized presentation would work nicely. But this would probably
alienate too many people, so I would suggest the simple approach of using
the link as a heading (...) and the description
a normal paragraph, or sometimes other content, below it. Demo:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/english.html

> My hunch is that explicitly writing out the URL as a text link would be a
> pain to have to listen to while using a screen reader,

Indeed. It gets rather dull, as we can guess simply by reading a URL
aloud. Some URL, especially some server technologies like nominally
database-driven systems, can be really awkward, with a very long "random"
string of characters.

> plus, the link itself
> doesn't really say what the page is.

Indeed. Sometimes a URL is descriptive, but it need not be, and it cannot
be very descriptive, partly due to character repertoire limitations.

> So, based on that, it'd make more sense
> to just link the site names, rather than writing out a full URL and linking
> that.

Exactly. Or page names. Or sometimes with a short name as the link text
and a long name or description in the title attribute for the link.

> However, the geek in me sees some value in writing out the full URL as it
> makes it easier to scan where the links are actually taking you, and makes
> it much more convienient to have to print out.

On normal browsers, the status line shows the URL, unless the author
messes it up wtih JavaScript nuisances, and on other browsers, there's
some other way of accessing the URL string if needed.

> Perhaps it'd be best to link the Site name and then show the full text link
> only on a print CSS version?

That's a bit questionable too, though I have sometimes used such an
approach when a document is designed to work online and also get printed
and copied. But normally the URL of the page itself is sufficient; the
user needs to type it only and then access all the links there, without
even needing to see the URLs unless he wants to.

What I have done in some cases is that I put the URL, delimited by the
"" delimiters for clarity, into the normal content of the page
but enclosed into a element which a class, with @media print
rule display: none for that class. Some caution is needed, but it seems to
work tolerably - _except_ that when CSS is off, the user needs to see or
listen to the URLs.

The more clever approach is to use generated content in CSS, so that the
URL to be printed is generated from the attribute value and not written
into the document content proper. But this does not work on IE, so it's
mainly an option if you just want to create printed versions on advanced
browsers.

(I'm pretty sure some old version(s) of IE had the option of printing a
table of links at the end of a printed copy, via the print settings.
I wonder what happened to it.)

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