Printing the URL next to the link (was:RE: Fixed table width)

At 08:48 PM 1/7/00 +0000, Piers Williams wrote:
...
>My personal thoughts are that the only time this is ever really a problem is
>when one quotes Urls in the text of a page, to which there is an obvious
>answer: Don't. There shouldn't ever be a need to - the visible section of
>the link should be a meaningful identifier of what the linked content
>represents, not the text of the url itself.
>
>The only compelling reason i can think of to write the url onto screen is
>the lack in any browser i know of of the ability to render the url next to
>the linked content in print-outs of the page. I suppose we can hope (as ugly
>as the concept of printing out html page complete with urls is, it's a real
>need)

One can achieve printing the URL of a link using the :after pseudo 
element in CSS2. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html  E.g.,

a:after {content: attr(href)}

A somewhat similar functionality (but less "ugly") is offerred by some
existing 
browsers: 
Both Internet Explorer 5.0 and many versions of Lynx allow printing the
list of 
URLs with their link descriptions at the bottom of the printed page. Lynx
also can 
put numbers next to the links' description in the text itself.

Regards,
Nir.
===================================
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Brown University 
Providence, RI
USA

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Friday, 7 January 2000 16:37:53 UTC