Punctuating URLs in a sentence

Authoring
1

Let’s assume that a game is offline, and that underlining is not an option. If you are including a URL in a part of the sentence that would usually be followed by a period or comma, how do you punctuate it? Should you put the period or comma right after the URL, even though it might make copying and pasting the URL more difficult?

This is just an example:

For hints, visit intfiction.org, or for a full solution, visit ifdb.org.
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2

I think there’s no rule enforcing one way, but instead it is a question of personal style. I personally would place a space between URL and punctuation.

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Same. Or put <angle brackets> around it.

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4

I believe both AP and Chicago styles are just as you’ve written it.

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5

I usually (attempt to) rephrase to avoid those kinds of questions: “Visit intfiction.org for hints, or ifdb.org for a full solution.”

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My policy is to put the URL and nothing else on a line by itself, and I consider in-line URLs to be rude.

So I’d probably do something like,

Hints and other advice can be found at:

http://intfiction.org

And if I had multiple URLs to share, I’d put each on a separate line and with blank lines between if any of them are ridiculously long and take up more than a line.

Then again, I like being able to arrow to the line containing a url and doing home, shift+end, ctrl+c to copy and selecting in line URLs is much more work, and I don’t like subjecting others to things I find annoying if I can help it.

This, of course, assumes I can’t create a proper link, in which I’d probably hide the URL if it’s more than just a domain and have the link cover as much of the text as is reasonable.

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7

Now I’m curious: I hadn’t realized inline links were a problem. When I’m using keyboard navigation, with both Firefox and Chrome, tabbing to a link selects it, so ctrl+c copies the URL without any further manipulation. Does using a screenreader block that behavior? Or are you using another browser?

Edit: oh, wait. I went out of my way to make the URLs not be links because they were just for demonstration purposes and I didn’t want them to be distracting. I assumed that in whatever document they would be actual clickable links. So I probably misunderstood what you’re talking about…

8

In-line links are fine. In-line, plain-text URLs are a total pain in the anatomy… as is text selection that isn’t selecting whole lines in general, but in-line URLs that aren’t linked tend to be the most common case of needing to copy something where I don’t want the whole line.

And for reasons beyond my comprehension, there are major websites that not only don’t auto link urls in user posts, but don’t even have the ability to make links(I’m staring unseeingly at you, Kickstarter), and for equally inscrutable reasons, Firefox doesn’t automatically convert URLs to links and if there’s a browser extension for this, I don’t know it.

Selecting text with mid-line start and end points is just one of those things that’s practically trivial if you can see the highlighted text that becomes much more clunky when you have to depend on the screen reader reporting what’s being selected and the page not doing anything unusual that interferes with accurate reporting of the selection.

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9

I use Linkify Plus Plus for this. (I’m using the userscript, but there’s also a Firefox add-on.) It catches false positives here and there, of course, but I still find it really useful overall.

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To be clear, I meant a plain text URL within a game–for example, in the help text of a parser game, which is not necessarily going to be run online in a browser.

Thanks, everyone!

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