Comments on: Link Previews, and How to use them Correctly

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:50:33 +0000

Yep, Lorelle is right on. I use title=”long description” on Vibe Technology / VibeTalk. However, it’s not automatic. If you look in the article you reference, I did this for external links too. I think there’s a title maker plugin out there somewhere you might use.

For display, I use a plug-in called WS-Tooltips by Christopher Hartmann. This allows a more useful display of the title which degrades gracefully.

I made some small modifications to widen the box and cut off the domain name in the link if the URL is long (it just seems useless to display it otherwise – it’s always cut off). I only spent a few minutes doing this, so it’s a bit of a hack. Ideally you would dynamically adjust the width via code…

By: Nenad

Nenad — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:11:52 +0000

I didn’t actually mean the standard title tags, they generally do not allow for a description of any length, and they look fairly ugly. I was thinking of something that will display a couple of rows of text, which still looks good.

I will add the title tags to my posts from now on, I see what you mean by usability. I guess I just forgot about them, since I never read them myself.

Thanks for the feedback!

By: Lorelle

Lorelle — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 07:21:54 +0000

Actually, if you want a text "description" to popup when hovering over the link, just add it to your link tag. Link I see you aren't using them in your blog post content, and they are required by web standards. For example, the link to my site would feature this hover over Lorelle on WordPress. Simple and easy, and meets the standards for web accessibility. Nothing fancy. And certainly not covering most of your content or distracting.