Hyperlink Style Guide Contents

• What are hyperlinks
• How to hyperlink
  • Tweaking an onsite link location
  • Proper link naming regarding...
    • Movies, files or images
    • Accessibility
    • Sidebars
• Further Information

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What are hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are called many names ( eg URLsx, links, etc ), but are considered to be the glue of the web. The web wouldn't be as powerful of medium if it weren't for the ability to move between documents with a simple mouse click.

With a simple underlined phrase, you can be taken around the world and learn about things you've never dreamed!

All about Tibetian Spaniels

Geeks In Ghana

How to Hyperlink

In the Portfolio, creating hyperlinks is much easier due to the special text markup called Structured Text Markup. If you want to know the basics of creating your own hyperlink in this special markup, read how to Link To A Web Page. It will help you link to pages which are off site relative to the Portfolio.

There are a couple of necessary changes which need to be made when linking to pages within the Portfolio. Continue reading to find out more.

Tweaking an onsite link location

When creating a link which is pointing to a page or object within the portfolio ( ie, an address starting with http://www.portfolio.pdx.edu/ ), it's important to change the link slightly for portability between machines. This comes into play when the Portfolio is put on another machine and taken on the road to show to others.

This is simple to do. If your structured text link looks like this:

"this is my link":http://www.portfolio.pdx.edu/Portfolio/This_Page/

change it to:

"this is my link":/Portfolio/This_Page/

In other words, take of the server name and leave all of the stuff after it. But make sure that there is a forward slash (/) after the colon (:) following the quote.

Read how to Link To A Portfolio Page if you want detailed steps for creating an on-site link.

Proper Naming ( Movies, Files or Images )

It is courteous to put the size of the file in the hyperlink name when they are linked to movies or large images which will be downloaded. It's best to let visitors make an informed decision about choosing to download a file because of time instead of them finding out the hard way.

As an example, this link:

Big movie to download

should become:

Big movie to download (12Mb)

Here are some common measures of size and how you might write them:

      1.5Kb  ( kilobyte - 1,000 Bytes )
      12Mb   ( megabyte - 1,000,000 bytes )
      3.3Gb  ( gigabyte - 1,000,000,000 bytes )

Guideline

As a rule, the files should be marked if they are over 100Kb. This would be 50 seconds on a 2kb/s modem connection. In the computer world, one minute is a long time to wait!

Finding the size of an image

You can find out how big the image is in several ways depending on the machine you're using.

In windows

If you've uploaded or downloaded the file to your local machine, right click on it and select the Properties menu.

In Mac OS

If you've uploaded or downloaded the file to your local machine, click on the file and press command-I ( ie, Get Info )

In Zope

In the Zope interface, click on the file. The next window will show you the file size as well as other properties.

Proper Naming ( Accessibility )

Accessibility is a major issue with the Portfolio. The Portfolio was designed to be used by those who browse the Internet using alternate methods such as screen readers.

An important part of making a web site accessible is through the names of the hyperlinks.

Please see the Accessibility Style Guide for more information regarding hyperlink names.

Proper Naming ( Sidebars )

Links in sidebars have their own special naming format. Please read the Sidebar Style Guide for more information.

Further Information

You might need to add the entity reference   after the link. Read about this in the trouble shooting document Last Hyperlink Not Hyper.

For additional structured text markup, see the Structured Text Rules.