Comments on: On the usability of contextual URLs

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:12:10 +0000

Being able to get the URL information from the printed document is definitely a valuable benefit…

What I find frustrating is when webbers only give links to a site’s homepage and expect all their users to do the digging around to track down the page they need - when it isn’t always easy to do! - instead of providing a deep link.

Yes, that’s VERY irritating. What’s worse is when you’re attempting to deep link to a website which doesn’t have a permanent or fixed link structure! Now that is not just irritating, but damn well stupid!

By: Mike Cherim

Mike Cherim — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:50:06 +0000

@Stevie D: The print page example is definitely a good argument for full URLs. Another option, I suppose, would be to provide a printable list of URLs at the end of the page.

By: Stevie D

Stevie D — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:43:23 +0000

People like the internet to be open and transparent. They want to make their links useful, and if they are referring to a website that they feel will be generally useful (as opposed to a specific page that will be useful in this particular context), sometimes they think the best way to do this is to spell out the name of the website, so that it is obvious where the link goes to.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find words to fit, especially if the name of the website is the URL, or if the URL is more well-known than the actual name - if I’m deciding whether to have link text of Joe Dolson’s website or joedolson.com, I’ll ask myself which people are more likely to recognise - and there’s probably not a lot in it! A URL sometimes seems to stand out more than inline link text, so if you really want people to click on a link, that might be an effective way to highlight it.

One reason, which is reducing in significance, is that it allows IE6 users to print the page and still have the URL they need to follow - of course, we’re all putting content: ” (” attr(href) “) “; in our print stylesheets, aren’t we!

No, I don’t generally like using the name of the website as the link text, especially when it is inline, but there are times when it is preferable. What I find frustrating is when webbers only give links to a site’s homepage and expect all their users to do the digging around to track down the page they need - when it isn’t always easy to do! - instead of providing a deep link.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:26:08 +0000

Huh. I never realized that I could do that…guess it never occurred to me to think about it. Actually, I don’t really like that kind of inconsistency…

Yeah, I constantly fall behind in keeping that list of allowed XHTML allowed — - every time I update, it ends up back to the default. And it’s a stupid default.

By: Mike Cherim

Mike Cherim — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:44:40 +0000

@Benjamin: Thank you very much. That’s what I suspected. The screen reader would announce that it’s a link, then read the link text.

@Joe: It’s good to be the king. As the blog’s admin, you can post anything you want it in your comments. The admin’s comments are passed through different filtering. I post pre elements in my comments a lot — - for form support mostly — - but visitors aren’t allowed to

Speaking of “allowed XHTML,” you should probably strike strike. Somebody might actually use it. Though I don’t think del is allowed. Not sure. :(

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:07:40 +0000

Well, what do you know. It did! I suspected that Wordpress may not have actually managed to suppress some of the more obscure markup elements.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:06:42 +0000

I didn’t even notice that parenthetical, actually. Thanks, Benjamin — - good to have that explained!

link: a recent Accessites article

Just checking to see whether it would work anyway. :)

By: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:46:00 +0000

Mike Cherim wonders above whether screen readers would typically read the HREF attribute (the URL) for links that have ordinary link text. In my experience of screen readers, while it would probably be possible to query this information one way or another, what you’d normally hear when going through a page is something along the lines of: “like Mike Cherim mentions in link a recent Accessites article”. Hmm… shame the permitted XHTML don’t allow me to enclose that in samp

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:11:51 +0000

Length is definitely a major problem in a lot of cases. An average domain name is usually speakable and usable, but many page-level (or, say, search result level) URL’s are simply unmanageably long — - and include numerous special characters, etc.

So far, not a very strong case for them! ;)

By: Mike Cherim

Mike Cherim — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 03:52:41 +0000

I can think of two reasons I wouldn’t want to use them and prefer link text: The length. I know this doesn’t always apply, but sometimes. Long unbroken links can ruin a good block of text.

The second reason is for screen reader users: It would seem to me it’d be a drag to have the nice article that my machine is reading to be rudely interrupted by an ungainly h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-dubbayu-dubbayu-dubbayu-fullstop(dot)… etc. (Though I’m not 100% sure about this. It is possible this information would be read to the screen reader user anyway.)

There are a couple of places where I do use quasi-bare URLs. My home page (click my name to see it) is one such example. On my sidebar I invite visitors to visit some of my other sites and I display what is actually link text, but it is also enough — - accessibility wise — - to be useful even if the text wasn’t linked. One of the links, for example, leads to GreenMethods.com. As you can see by this, the “GreenMethods.com” part of it, the link text, even unlinked, sufficiently gives the user the URL. Since the length fits where it does, I’m happy with it written like I that. If, however, one of my other sites was… “ThisIsOneOfMyOtherSixWebSitesThatIBuiltAndManage.com” I’d feel compelled to fall back on a Plan B of some sort.