For most of us there is the <a> button on our editing screens.  When clicking on that we get a pop-up screen that allows us to enter a URL no matter how long.  The next screen will ask for a “title of the link” and we enter the descriptive terms.

Another way of doing this is to highlight the descriptive term and then hit the <a> button.  The second pop-up window will have the highlighted string as the descriptive term and you just accept it.

what about other browsers?

I didn’t in any way understand Faldage’s approach.

It is possible to use Metamark’s service here.  Go to their website, pop in the long url and post it as I have posted samclem’s below:

http://xrl.us/oy67h

That may be a work-around for those whose browsers don’t support these options here.  I dunno

You can also add explicit carriage returns
when posting after someone has put in a long url.

like this perhaps:

http://books.google.com/books?id=oNsNAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA150&dq=burgoo++date:1700-1745&lr=&num=30
&as_brr=0#PPA150,M1

In fact, this may be what SamClem did.  But then are you forced to cut and paste the url into a new tab or browser window?

edit: it works as Faldage suggests.  I put in a return after the number 30 and it worked.

For most of us there is the <a> button on our editing screens.  When clicking on that we get a pop-up screen that allows us to enter a URL no matter how long.  The next screen will ask for a “title of the link” and we enter the descriptive terms.

Thank you, oecolampadius! At last I understand what is meant by “the title of the link”. I think I might even be able now to post a link in this way!

I didn’t intend that anyone put a carriage return in the url itself.  What I meant in the part of my post where I suggested putting in the carriage return was that, when someone else has put in a long url and the text in all the other posts extends beyond the right side of the screen, that subsequent posters would put the carriage return in their text to prevent it from also extending beyond the screen edge.

Faldage - 03 December 2008 04:11 AM

I didn’t intend that anyone put a carriage return in the url itself.  What I meant in the part of my post where I suggested putting in the carriage return was that, when someone else has put in a long url and the text in all the other posts extends beyond the right side of the screen, that subsequent posters would put the carriage return in their text to prevent it from also extending beyond the screen edge.

First a nit; with my configuration XP and ff3.x, if I mouse over <b> <i> <u> <img> and quote I get a drop-down explaining that it is bold, italic etc. but with @ and <a> I get no drop-down, so at first blush it is not obvious what these are to effect.

Now, to make linking really simple, if one has Firefox, just use Copy as HTML.

To paraphrase a once popular TV character called Mr. T ‘’Pity the poor fool who don’t have Firefox’’.

If the above light-hearted kibitzing is inappropriate advise and I will delete it.

so at first blush it is not obvious what these are to effect.

I raised this in the beta stage of this board but was told that anyone who has learned html language, this is one of the first things you come across.  But if you haven’t?

And if you have, you don’t need to be told what <b>, <i> and <u> do.

Exactly to the point Doc!

First a nit; with my configuration XP and ff3.x, if I mouse over <b> <i> <u> <img> and quote I get a drop-down explaining that it is bold, italic etc. but with @ and <a> I get no drop-down, so at first blush it is not obvious what these are to effect.

I took a look at the markup. The first six a elements have a title attribute which is set to the text one sees when one rolls over the hyperlink. The mail, link, and close tags hyperlinks lack that attribute. (The alt attribute is part of the img element.) So lack of roll-over information is because whoever coded the form, dropped off the title tag and not to a feature or bug in a user agent (browser).

Oecolampadius - 02 December 2008 07:20 PM

For most of us there is the <a> button on our editing screens.  When clicking on that we get a pop-up screen that allows us to enter a URL no matter how long.  The next screen will ask for a “title of the link” and we enter the descriptive terms.

Another way of doing this is to highlight the descriptive term and then hit the <a> button.  The second pop-up window will have the highlighted string as the descriptive term and you just accept it.

what about other browsers?

In Iceweasel, if you do that, nothing happens.

It is possible to use Metamark’s service here.  Go to their website, pop in the long url and post it as I have posted samclem’s below:

http://xrl.us/oy67h

That may be a work-around for those whose browsers don’t support these options here.  I dunno

Or use the Firefox “Copy as HTML link” function except this appears to refuse to copy off the browser bar and only copy existing links (at least with Iceweasel, anyway).