Wordsmith.org: the magic of words

Wordsmith Talk

About Us | What's New | Search | Site Map | Contact Us  

Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
Page 1 of 3 1 2 3
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
D
Pooh-Bah
OP Offline
Pooh-Bah
D
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
While I understand what a link and hyperlink are, there is a third kind of link which for want of a better name I call a sublink, and appears as a shorter version often also in blue with underline, usu a common word or phrase and which clicked upon has exactly the same effect as if it were the entire link

Also am I not correct in assuming that the purpose of a sublink is not to save space on the forum's hard drive but to prevent the basic kind of link from overrunning a line, which isn't permitted on some forums, owing to inferior programming techniques. Actually is not the original link contained within the sublink so that the two together actually occupy more code than the original link alone

I haven't sublinked the following because I understand WS' algorithm permits multiline links

http://www.wordwizard.com/ch_forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=20245&whichpage=1

http://www.wordwizard.com/ch_forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=20246



dalehileman
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
I'm not sure what you mean by sublink, but if it's just a truncated version of a link, some forums have redundant information in the url to a specific thread and you don't need all of it to get there. I know that worked on the old AWAD forum, never tried it on this version just because it's so easy to link like this

Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
perhaps what dahil is asking is what this is called in your post, Faldo. I've always just referred to one of those underlined 'hot links' as, simply, a link; if you hover over it with your mouse pointer you see the actual link address down in the status bar. Link and hyperlink are really interchangeable terms.

Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542


as to your example links, they are of some interest to anyone who wonders about browser differences, as do I. Depending on how you have your window sized, IE7 may indeed interpret a longer link as multiline, and in this case breaks after the '?'. firefox, on the other hand, leaves everything on a single line, but utilizes a scrollbar to do so. If you don't currently see this in action, just grab the right edge of your browser window with your mouse and drag it to the left, thereby shrinking the window.

p.s. to Faldo: I believe shortening a wordsmith link still works; the first number is the key..
wordsmith.org/board/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/172095/

Last edited by tsuwm; 12/15/07 10:31 PM.
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Yes, tsuwm, I agree that both link and hyperlink are synonymous. As with many dahilian requests, I am sure he'll choose to ignore this, but here goes. There's something called a URL (uniform resource locator). You can think of it as an address (or locator) to something (or resource) on the Net (not just the Web). It has several parts:

1. The protocol (nope, Dahil, not the cabal of good old boys in cahoots with Bill Gates, but the http part). There are other protocols: e.g., file, ftp, https.

Then comes a colon (:) and a couple of forward slashes (//).

2. The domain, that's the www period domainname period tld part: this is part of the stuff that holds the Net together and predates the web. The TLD (top level domain) is the edu for a university, com for a commercial business, etc part; the domain is like wordsmith in wordsmith.org; and, anything to the left of that one or more separated by periods is some specific machine within the domain.

Then comes a forward slash.

3. Everything after the domain name and before the question mark (?) is a path that organizes resources on the particular machine (or host) specified in the domain name part of things.

After the ?

4. There's a complicated syntax, but anything after the ? is basically data being passed to a CGI program specified by the URL. (Actually, there's also a # sign sometimes in there and that means a particular anchor within a HTML document that the URL points at. No, it's not a sublink, because no part of a URL is a link.)

Again, please note that a URL is not the same thing as a (hyper)link. The HTTP protocol (that final protocol is pleonastic and upsets some but not others) uses something called HTML to mark up text and images into a web page. There's an a element that uses a URL as an attribute. The a element gets interpreted by the web client (your browser) so that the text it surrounds is underlined and made blue (or purple after it's been visited) by default. That's the hyperlink. Again a hyperlink and a URL are not the same thing. If you really want to learn more about this I can post some links to RFC (the standards docs that define what the web is).


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
good job, zmjezhd, but prolly TMI for dahil. (:

Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
D
Pooh-Bah
OP Offline
Pooh-Bah
D
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
tsu, zm: I'm not sure they are interchangeable terms because I was led to believe that a hyperlink was a special type of link addressing several sites or forums at the same time but in other respects you're way head of me although I will try your suggestions one at a time, and thank you for all that

It's not that I ignore it but that at 78 rpm I don't have that much time left to entertain new concepts and thus my aim is simplification not complexification but thank you profusely for your efforts which I am sure other younger and more patient contributors will find most useful

Yes after 21 keystrokes addressing it, I surely am TMI

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=abbreviations+TMI&btnG=Google+Search


Having specialized in that sort of stuff for years, my excellent No. 1 Son, a highly paid IT, had explained all that to me but of course in my advanced state of decay I can't remember it all, while he is only 33 rpm

It's interesting that you should mention the blue underline, incidentally, because sometimes you don't automatically get it, much to the dismay of many of my email correspondents, until I inadvertently hit the Enter key and suddenly there it was

God bless Bill Gates

----Yours pleonastically


dalehileman
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
I'm not sure they are interchangeable terms because I was led to believe that a hyperlink was a special type of link addressing several sites or forums at the same time but in other respects you're way head of me although I will try your suggestions one at a time, and thank you for all that.

Well, I'd say you're wrong.

Having specialized in that sort of stuff for years, my excellent No. 1 Son, a highly paid IT, had explained all that to me but of course in my advanced state of decay I can't remember it all

You know, Dahil. I have been in IT (the field, not the person) for just over twenty years, where I have worked, professionally, as a writer, a programmer, and an instructor. If you can't remember what your son told you, why wouldn't you believe me? Or Faldage or tsuwm? A link is a hyperlink is a sausage. Link does have other meanings in the IT context: e.g., to link means to join together two or more object (binary) files (i.e., after compilation) into a single executable program, in Unix, a link (aka shortcut in Windows, alias in pre-MacOS X days) is an alternate name for a file. I've never really come across the term sublink, and think it is a Dahilian fata morgana. I've seen weblink and hotlink, both of which are pretty much synonymous with hyperlink and link.

TMI == too much information


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
D
Pooh-Bah
OP Offline
Pooh-Bah
D
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
zm, thank you for your infinite patience. I have sent a link of this thread, to my excellent No. 1 Son, who might translate it for me. And I do know TMI, as you will see above I provided a link that will explain it also to the uninitiated

PS: I was an electronics engineer in the days before the Web but if I described one of my inventions, eg a single pnp- or npn
transistor frequency divider containing no bistable circuitry but the R-C time constant in its base depending on conduction of the base-emitter junction at the peak of a pulse, polarity depending on the type of transistor, charging the coupling capacitor between the occurrence of subsequent pulses and thus providing a bias to as to prevent a fixed number of subsequent occurrences from appearing at the collector; you wouldn't know what I was talking about. Patent No. supplied on request, I'm dalehileman@verizon.net

My most sincer apologies to Fal for not having explained in sufficient detail what I mean by sublink.

But in 25 words or less could anyone possibly give me a single word for what I call sublink, that is a link curtailed, for example, so that it would occupy less space, or at least only a single line, in a post, s compared with the complete URL or link that it replaces. Usually, then, a sublink is a word or phrase almost always underlined to identify it as a kind of link so that the reader will know that he is to click on it, and as I have said, often blue in color as with the original, longer, link


dalehileman
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
Offline
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
I was an electronics engineer in the days before the Web but if I described one of my inventions, eg a single pnp- or npn transistor frequency divider containing no bistable circuitry but depending on the time constant in the base circuitry depending on the base-emitter junction charging the coupling capacitor between the occurrence of subsequent pulses and thus providing a bias to as to prevent a fixed number of subsequent subsequent occurrences from appearing at the collector; you wouldn't know what I was talking about

But, the difference between you and me is that if I asked somebody who was an electrical engineer what the difference between a resistor and capacitor was, and she took the time to describe it to me in pretty much plain old English, I would not subsequently tell her, no, you've got it wrong, you see, though I don't really know what the difference is, and I know this because my grandson the electrical engineer told me something a couple of years ago about Leyden jars which I cannot remember at the moment, but I'm sure it contradicted what you said. You see: I would try to understand what she wrote. Then, I'd follow up by going to a reference work of some sort and reading up about it, and see if I understood what the difference was, and go back and look at what she wrote to see if I could understand what she was talking about, but that's just what I'd do.



Ceci n'est pas un seing.
Page 1 of 3 1 2 3

Moderated by  Jackie 

Link Copied to Clipboard
Forum Statistics
Forums16
Topics13,912
Posts229,271
Members9,179
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
Newest Members
TRIALNERRA, befuddledmind, KILL_YOUR_SUV, Heather_Turey, Standy
9,179 Registered Users
Who's Online Now
0 members (), 399 guests, and 3 robots.
Key: Admin, Global Mod, Mod
Top Posters(30 Days)
Top Posters
wwh 13,858
Faldage 13,803
Jackie 11,613
tsuwm 10,542
wofahulicodoc 10,502
LukeJavan8 9,915
AnnaStrophic 6,511
Wordwind 6,296
of troy 5,400
Disclaimer: Wordsmith.org is not responsible for views expressed on this site. Use of this forum is at your own risk and liability - you agree to hold Wordsmith.org and its associates harmless as a condition of using it.

Home | Today's Word | Yesterday's Word | Subscribe | FAQ | Archives | Search | Feedback
Wordsmith Talk | Wordsmith Chat

© 1994-2024 Wordsmith

Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.5