Hacker News Reader

Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

On HN it makes sense to me, because a long link would interrupt the flow of text. So you do a footnote to make them go out of the way. Otherwise Wikipedia has a happy medium I think; footnotes are on the bottom where you'd expect, but they show on hover so you don't have to jump there and then back.

View on HN

If only the Web had a way to make text clickable withtout showing the whole target URL.

The technology just isn't there yet.

The reason is that trolls like to post links to shock sites or a google search for something terrible. Even worse, you could get rickrolled.

Some day we will have native browser support for the full URL showing in the status field.

Oh no cried the scammers, how will we ever again trick people into clicking a link

window.status to the rescue! We must override the long scam URL there!

Just wanted to say, the best part was acknowledging the worst was being rickrolled. xD

There must be other reasons, if it doesn't make sense technologically, no? Instagram also has the tech to show more than 3 images in a row, and Twitter could allow longer texts if they wanted so.

Sarcasm acknowledged

Hiding in the URL is a favorite feature for scams and pranks

I find inline links incredibly disruptive to my reading flow, the change in color makes my eyes start jumping around in the text. Wikipedia especially is absolutely hopeless, to the point where I've built a mirror that removes all inline links. (A page looks like this: https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Hyperlink )

Looks good. A bit out of date though

Yeah, I think the there is a new data dump available, will rebuild the html files from that soon.

Just found this FF add-on [1], yesterday, which removes all links from a page. Works reasonably well. Can also invoke reader view after removing links and get the benefits there.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/nolinks/

Wouldn't a user script work just as well for this purpose? `document.querySelectorAll('a').for each(a=>{a.outerHTML=a.innerHTML});`

Sure, that works too. You still get the megabyte pageloads though, and you need to carry the script with you every where you go.

Just make it the same color. For me links on HN are underlined but the same color as regular text or a slightly dimmer gray if already visited. It's one of the first things I do when I install a new browser and if it's hard that browser doesn't stay installed long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com