Guidance on display of external URLs in lessons

[ostephens]

Before Library Carpentry lessons formally joined the Carpentries, we had some discussion about the display of URLs in lessons (see data-lessons/library-openrefine-DEPRECATED#54)

tl/dr; should we include full URLs in the lesson visible to the users so they can be read both on screen and in print outs, or should they be done as hyperlinks with sensible link text instead of the full URL displayed

Guidance on this in the style guide would be appreciated

[maneesha]

Tagging @serahrono as I think this falls into accessibility work she is doing.

[bencomp]

I believe URLs are automatically shown in full when you print lesson content. (At least in the old infrastructure they were.)

So the "lemma" on links in the style guide applies, in my opinion: use meaningful text as link text, not URLs.

[maneesha]

@elletjies Do you want to keep this issue active in the new handbook? If it is no longer relevant, we can close this issue.

Note for now, would just be moving the issue to the new handbook. We don't need to create new resources or materials yet.

Asking you as this is accessibility related; not sure who the best person to ask for this would be.

[elletjies]

@maneesha could we move it to the new handbook so that CET can have a deeper discussion?

[maneesha]

@tobyhodges What should we do with this issue?

[tobyhodges]

It is best practice for web accessibility to use meaningful link text, and I believe the lessons and handbooks are read online much more often than they are printed out/downloaded as a PDF.

It looks like CSS can be used to add the URLs after links in the print version, as suggested by @bencomp above, so I will open an issue on varnish where we can discuss that further. Do you want to explore adding that to the CSS here too? If not, I suggest that the issue is closed.

[maneesha]

I don't know why I tagged Toby on this -- I think I meant to tag @elletjies

Anyhow, we did get an interesting solution from Toby, so I tried it out. See PR #290
The page displays as usual in the browser, but in the print out we see the urls for each link. Note this means that full URLs will always display when you print. It also displays relative URLs. Having them print optionally would require much more work and is beyond the scope of what we can do now.

Preview in browser:

Preview of printed page:

Also tagging @froggleston for input.