14

In question or answer comments, hyperlinks currently get rendered in a truncated form as:

stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/...

This cuts off the most useful part of the link (the post title, or an URLified version of it anyway).

I suggest using the title= attribute of the anchor for links to internal SOFU sites, so that when hovering over the link a popup tooltip will show the full post title. In the case above, the link might be:

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c"
   title="Hidden Features of C#?">stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/...</a>

In addition to being more informative, this will remove the ambiguity introduced by the URLified title (does "hidden-features-of-c" represent hidden features of C? C++? C#?).

Update: The formatting of internal comment links was recently changed and this question marked as "status-completed". Cool! However this is only half of what is needed, as the tooltip text is created by extracting whatever text the commenter types after the question number, and bears no relation to what the question title actually is in the database. As a result (see the comments below) one can make any tooltip text appear, and this feature still doesn't resolve the ambiguity mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Improve this question
12

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

I would like to have the title, but... Why not just make it the link text? 

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c">
Hidden Features of C#?</a>
Improve this answer
1
  • 2
    That would make "internal" links render very differently from "external" links, and such automatic behaviour might be confusing. On seeing that, one may be led to believe that there would be a way to create an external link in a comment with user-supplied link text, which of course there isn't. Also, for the case of internal links, it's nice to keep the domain name visible (though you could modify your link text to include like "Stack Overflow - Hidden Features of C#?", for example).
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented Sep 17, 2009 at 1:38
2

There's another element that would be helpful: the visible link (that is underlined in the browser) should show the title portion of the post, not "stackoverflow/questions/..." which is rather pointless.

This is something that SO's customized Markdown could be doing (as discussed in the blog yesterday) -- filter on SO links and customize the visible text accordingly. (And use the real title of the post, rather than using whatever random stuff the user chooses to include -- see comments above for examples.) :)

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .