Yo, Fodor's Gurus!
 

Just in case you missed yesterday's discussion -

many of us agree that long URLs that force horizontal scrolling in the browser are a nuisance.

The suggestion was offered that everyone use tinyurl.com to mitigate this problem. This is seen as being problematical, for at least three reasons: not everyone would automatically know that they <u>should</u> do it, not everyone <u>would</u> do it, and some readers feel that clicking on a blind link is undesirable because rogues could hide an obscene site behind the link.

My idea of how to approach this problem is to condense the huge URL so that only the domain name remains as visible, clickable text. Like so:

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.someserver.com/huge/unwieldy/document/reference/text/string&quot;&gt;http://www.someserver.com&lt;/a&gt;

Or something like that. You still have problems 1 &amp; 2.

Or are you saying that Fodor's will change to do this automatically for us?

Whoops. I'm not a guru.

Yes, AllisonK - that's precisely what I'm suggesting.

In fact, the change that was implemented last month that made URLs in posts into hypertext links could be revised very simply to perform this function.

OK, I'm not going to try to pretend I have a clue about what you're suggesting or certainly not how to do it. All I know is whatever you did, the problem still exists. While it would be nice if Fodors fixed the problem, they haven't yet, so why not just copy and paste into tinyurl.com or one of the other similar sites and avoid the problem all together?

It isn't the users' responsibility.

I realize that, but why refuse to do something so easy until they fix it?

If I'm in traffic and my car is blocking people from crossing the street because there is a truck illegally parked, it's not my responsibility to move, but if I can easily back up, why not do it, instead of continuing to block traffic, just because &quot;it's not my responsibility&quot;?

I did it in this thread to make a point.

I always look to see if my URL is going to cause overflow and use tinyurl if it does.

But having the users do it is a non-starter.

Robespierre, I tried the <b><i>&quot;&lt;a href=&quot; etc.</i></b> routine on one of Neopolitan's posts yesterday, and it didn't work. Perhaps I miskeyed something? Neo's post was the one titled <i> Those threads that mess up the screen</i> You want to take a look and see where I went wrong? I was calling the link <i> I Want Fodor's </i>, but giving it a weird name shouldn't matter (I think).
I'm thinking I need another &lt; or &gt; in there somewhere...

The &lt;a href= stuff is the HTML code to create a hypertext link. Fodor's won't let you make your own. But if they did, and <b><font color="blue">URL</font></b> were the destination document and <b><font color="red">LINK</font></b> the link text, then coding

This is the &lt;a href=&quot;<b><font color="blue">URL</font></b>&quot;&gt;<b><font color="red">LINK</font></b>&lt;/a&gt; you want...

will produce this:

This is the <b><font color="red">LINK</font></b> you want...

and clicking on <b><font color="red">LINK</font></b> will transport you to <b><font color="blue">URL</font></b>.

In the first post in this thread, the underlined blue text is the link text, and the big string between the quotes is the destination document. My solution hides most of the really long URL, but leaves the server name (someserver) so that the squeamish won't be unknowingly transported into some joker's den of iniquity.

Ahh... I didn't realize Fodor's wouldn't allow that to happen, and was really puzzled as to why my post wouldn't work the way I expected it to. I use the routine on the Apple Discussions board (I'm a Mac user), and it always works. Actually, this discussion seems to have gotten out of hand. Maybe Fodor's will step in and restore the peace. Has anyone approached them? I don't actually care one way or the other, but there are those who do.

That all looks complicated...

I wonder if it's worth all the trouble.

how does a sim card work? :-))

VS :-&quot;

It's not at all complicated, traveller1959. You insert a URL in your post, such as http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34786498, and the Fodor's script chops it down to this: http://www.fodors.com

Isn't that simple?