Marking PDF links

[Roedy Green]

I seem to recall reading about a feature so that you could apply
different styles to different kinds of link.

e.g. local and offsite or to automatically put a logo beside some
domain links.

I would like to add an icon to pdf links.

I'm after something of the form a:link("*.pdf) { properties ... }

Does anyone know the names of the keywords or the syntax, or if this
is even possible?
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[David Dorward]

Roedy Green wrote:

I seem to recall reading about a feature so that you could apply
different styles to different kinds of link.

e.g. local and offsite or to automatically put a logo beside some
domain links.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/...ute-substrings

Note that this is a working draft, not a final spec. There are some
experimental implementions in the wild, but everything is still subject to
change.

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me .uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Jukka K. Korpela]

David Dorward <do*****@yahoo. com> wrote:

Roedy Green wrote:

I seem to recall reading about a feature so that you could apply
different styles to different kinds of link.

e.g. local and offsite or to automatically put a logo beside some
domain links.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/...ute-substrings

Note that this is a working draft, not a final spec. There are some
experimental implementions in the wild, but everything is still subject to
change.

If you use type="applicati on/pdf" for links to PDF resources, you could use
attribute selectors in CSS for them.

That would be an exercise in futility, though. It is useful, and often
essential, to indicate PDF links as PDF links, since following such a link
may confuse the user, cause a considerable delay, result in a blank window,
crash the browser, give the user data that he cannot use because PDF is so
inaccessible a format (despite all the Adobe marketese), or simply fail to do
anything useful due to lack of any PDF viewer on the user's system. However,
many of these points are equally relevant or more relevant in browsing
situations where style sheets are not in use (or the intended visual
indication fails miserably, e.g. because it relies on colors and the user is
blind).

Thus, the best approach is something like
"There are more details on this in the (PDF) document Foo Bar."

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Roedy Green]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 11:33:26 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tu t.fi> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

That would be an exercise in futility, though. It is useful, and often
essential, to indicate PDF links as PDF links, since following such a link
may confuse the user, cause a considerable delay, result in a blank window,
crash the browser, give the user data that he cannot use because PDF is so
inaccessible a format (despite all the Adobe marketese), or simply fail to do
anything useful due to lack of any PDF viewer on the user's system.

However, if others have elected to provide their papers only in PDF
format, you have no choice if you want to link to them. The best I
figured I could do is warn people a link was to a PDF document.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[Jim Moe]

Roedy Green wrote:

I seem to recall reading about a feature so that you could apply
different styles to different kinds of link.

I would like to add an icon to pdf links.

CSS:
a .pdf {
background: #fff url(pdf-image-path) left center no-repeat;
padding-left: width-of-image-px;
}

HTML:
<a href="http://..." class="pdf">wha tever</a>

The image would have to be fairly small (< 16px height) to not interfere
with other inline text. Which would likely make the PDF logo unrecognizable.

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

[Roedy Green]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 11:33:26 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tu t.fi> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

That would be an exercise in futility, though. It is useful, and often
essential, to indicate PDF links as PDF links, since following such a link
may confuse the user, cause a considerable delay, result in a blank window,
crash the browser, give the user data that he cannot use because PDF is so
inaccessible a format (despite all the Adobe marketese), or simply fail to do
anything useful due to lack of any PDF viewer on the user's system. However,
many of these points are equally relevant or more relevant in browsing
situations where style sheets are not in use (or the intended visual
indication fails miserably, e.g. because it relies on colors and the user is
blind).

what I have done in the meantime looks like this:

<a href="http://www.cs.brown.ed u/courses/cs161/papers/j-nio-ltr.pdf"
class="pdf">nio tutorial in PDF</a>
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[Chris Beall]

Roedy Green wrote:

On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 11:33:26 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tu t.fi> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

That would be an exercise in futility, though.

(snip)

what I have done in the meantime looks like this:

<a href="http://www.cs.brown.ed u/courses/cs161/papers/j-nio-ltr.pdf"
class="pdf">nio tutorial in PDF</a>

Roedy,

Actually, the SOURCE looks like this. Since the newsgroup doesn't have
access to your stylesheet, we have no idea what the RESULT looks like.

In any case, IMO:
- Yes, you should identify links to PDFs (or any filetype other than
(X)HTML.
- You should also show its size, since many such external resources
are huge. At the least, this will allow the user to know in advance
that linking to this resource might be a good time to take a bathroom
break...

(Yes, in this case DeveloperWorks could update the document and change
its size, but you'd probably still be in the ballpark.)

Chris Beall

[Sander Tekelenburg]

In article <87************ *************** *****@4ax.com>,
Roedy Green <my************ *************** ***@munged.inva lid> wrote:

I seem to recall reading about a feature so that you could apply
different styles to different kinds of link.

e.g. local and offsite or to automatically put a logo beside some
domain links.

I would like to add an icon to pdf links.

Have a look at
<http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/WWW/userfriendlierh yperlinks/>

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/%7Etekelenb/>

[Roedy Green]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:11:40 GMT, Chris Beall
<Ch*********@pr odigy.net> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

(Yes, in this case DeveloperWorks could update the document and change
its size, but you'd probably still be in the ballpark.)

I generate much of my code with HTML static macros expanded prior to
upload. So if I really wanted I could check the file sizes. I do to
some extent for local files.

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/htmlstaticmacros.html

the style looks like this:

..pdf, a.pdf:link, a.pdf:visited, a.pdf:active
/* download a pdf file */{
background: url(images/pdf.png) transparent no-repeat scroll
right;
/* top right bottom left */
padding: 3px 35px 3px 2px;
}

The problem was not the style. It was trying to automatically hook it
up to the .pdf extension.

You can see it in action at http://mindprod.com/jgloss/nio.html
near the bottom.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.

[Roedy Green]

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006 01:01:48 +0100, Sander Tekelenburg
<us**@domain.in valid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

Have a look at
<http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/WWW/userfriendlierh yperlinks/>

I'm puzzled how you could select by MIME type. You don't normally find
that out the MIME type until you probe the server. But you don't
normally do that until you click a link.

Does the browser probe all the links on page??? Surely not. Or does it
make some guess at the MIME type from the extension.? That guess is
probably wrong as every server uses a different table of extensions to
MIME.

Severs would have to divulge their lists.
..
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.