Proper way to describe a URL in print

May 14, 2004 3:00 PM

Editors, tech-savvy folk, and grammar-obsessives, please help. I've been arguing about this with my fellow editors: Is it acceptable, in nontechnical copy, to drop the "http://" from the beginning of a web address that doesn't have a "www" in its URL?

Here's the deal. I work for a university. We want to direct prospective students to a particular area of our Web site--foo.university.edu. I'm in disagreement with the rest of the department in that I think that a)young adults are savvy enough to recognize a web address when they see one (the first argument given to me for keeping the "http://") and b)most folks' browsers are modern/intuitive enough that you don't have to type "http://" into the address bar before the web address (the second argument given).

Chicago seems keen on keeping the http off in running text, when one is describing a site but not directing readers to it. However, they seem to use "http://" in all references to URLs otherwise. This would back up my officemates' argument.

Does anyone agree with my stance, that our department needs to get modern? Or am I in the wrong here? I find "http://" pretty damned visually jarring.

posted by cowboy_sally to computers & internet (36 comments total)

our rule at my mag is that if you can get to the site without typing the www you can print it as is. (we test tho first, in IE). We never print http:// at all.
posted by amberglow at 3:06 PM on May 14, 2004

I don't see a problem unless, in context, it was somehow unclear that it was a web address.
posted by mcwetboy at 3:11 PM on May 14, 2004

I'm going to chime in against. I do agree that the "http://" is ugly but how else would you make text like this clearer:

"Interested readers should point their browsers to del.icio.us."

I think even web-savvy readers would be confused. I know that URL is exceptional but it does provide support for an external marker that a piece of text is a URL.
posted by vacapinta at 3:11 PM on May 14, 2004

MLA seems to like using "http://".
posted by Stoatfarm at 3:16 PM on May 14, 2004

If you leave the http:// in, then when your copy inevitably gets e-mailed to someone, their mailtool can recognize the URL and make it clickable. That's nice.

Also, not all URLs start with http://. Isn't it going to be a bit confusing if you eventually have to print an https:// or ftp:// URL in a list of URLs off of which you've left the protocol? Better to have one consistent standard.

And besides that, there's some subtle and worthwhile education in the full URL. You're using the HTTP protocol to ask the server foo.university.edu for the resource /directory/file.ext. Why obscure that?
posted by nicwolff at 3:17 PM on May 14, 2004

You're giving these "young adults" way too much credit, I think. Most of the people at my college know how to get to yahoo, google, and maybe hotmail. Oh, and they can make their instant messenger profiles very bright. But that's really about it. Seriously. When in doubt, dumb it down. And when it comes to college students, be very much in doubt about everything.
posted by evilbeck at 3:28 PM on May 14, 2004

I personally can't stand to see the http:// in the middle of copy. It's supposed to be a protocol used by software to determine how to open the file in question, not a semantic indicator of "web address". We don't write email addresses "mailto:[e-mail]". (on preview, nicwolff makes good points, and my suggested solution covers them all, I think.)

That having been said, I think the above del.icio.us example could be confusing (although I don't think savvvy folks would have a problem), the problem being it isn't preceded by the standard 'www' or suffixes (which will be available 99% of the time).

Again, that having been said, it would be nice to have a convention that makes sense in all situations, so here's what I suggest -- In the spirit of semantics, give the *title* of the document first, followed by a parenthetical web address. For example:

New students can find more information via the online Student Handbook (http://students.uw.edu/handbook/).
posted by o2b at 3:28 PM on May 14, 2004

o2b gets at what I'd suggest, but as with numbers, I don't think you can make a universal rule here. Especially with longer, hairier URLs, I think it is best to isolate them from running text (put at end of paragraph, in parens, whatever). But sometimes you want to refer to the site name as such: amazon.com, for example: people say "amazon dot com" and it would be somewhat unnatural and redundant to write Amazon.com (http://amazon.com/"). I think you've got to play it by ear.

Be as consistent as possible in your usage, and as economical as consistency permits.
posted by adamrice at 3:46 PM on May 14, 2004

Perhaps I take an overly anal view of things, coming from the technical side, but I hate, hate, hate seeing text like "For more, go to mycompany.com!"

Without a protocol, "mycomany.com" isn't a URL. It's a host name. Do you have more information about your company available via ftp there? Is there, perhaps, a text-based telnet BBS running there? Oh! I know! You've got a gopher server running! Or maybe not.

I have slightly more tolerance for "go to our website at mycompany.com", because that makes it a bit easier to infer that you're going to be using the hypertext transfer protocol, and that you should just connect to the default port.

I'd still rather see the http:// there, though, so there's no confusion.

And don't even get me started on people who say "http://www.mywebsite.com/mydirectory" when they mean "http://www.mywebsite.com/mydirectory/". The former is a file. The latter is a directory.
posted by jammer at 3:48 PM on May 14, 2004

slightly off topic: does anyone else hate it when someone says "aitch tee tee pee colon back-slash back-slash"... it's not a backslash! It's a regular forward slash!
posted by o2b at 3:55 PM on May 14, 2004

does anyone else hate it when

Oh, yes.

Also, I hate ads where some announcer chirpily exhorts you to "log on to our website at www dot stupidcorp dot com". You don't bloody well log on to a web site! It's a connectionless, stateless, anonymous protocol!! There is no logging-in! You just connect to the damned thing and ask for the root directory and it spews back HTML with no security and no idea who you are, and that's all there is to it. If it WERE a secured site that required you to log in, they'd hardly be advertising it. Grr.
posted by Mars Saxman at 4:13 PM on May 14, 2004

I hate more the web founders who took the *only* three syllable letter in the alphabet and then make us repeat it three times.
posted by vacapinta at 4:25 PM on May 14, 2004

Leaving off the "http://" from an URL is not like leaving "mailto:" off an email address. It's like leaving the "@" out.

On preview, what jammer said.
posted by majcher at 4:31 PM on May 14, 2004

vacapinta, it amuses me that pronouncing "world wide web" consumes fewer syllables than "double U double U double U." But lazy as I am, I usually abbreviate to "dub dub dub."

majcher, I must disagree. It's more like saying "you can contact me at [e-mail]" without specifying that the contact method should be email. Not too many people will be looking for the "@" button on their telephones or addressing written letters to that address. In context it's pretty obvious, and I think it's also pretty obvious what people mean when they say "visit my.stupid.website."

But as far as a standard for publication goes, o2b's is pretty good.
posted by hashashin at 5:02 PM on May 14, 2004

I believe AP style leaves the http:// in. The important thing with developing a style is that you are consistent. And since sometimes with Web sites you really benefit from having the http://, you should probably leave it in all the time.

If you use a different font, a different color, you italicize all Web sites, or you have some other obvious way of alerting your readers to the fact that they're looking at a Web page listing I think you could probably get away without the http://. But if you leave it off once, be prepared to leave it off all the time.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 5:06 PM on May 14, 2004

http:// was never designed to be used by humans it is machine language. It is built into the browser, you don't need to enter it. The inventor of the WWW Tim Berners-Lee laments this as a great mistake on his part. People use it anyway for non-technical reasons such as you describe as a way to recognize a URL. There are better ways.. highlite or underline the URL or just simply assume that people know what it is by the "dot com" extension.. even the dot com part of the URL Tim didnt want but it got beyond his grasp too quick so they are still trying to make URLs more natural language.

In any case you can contribute to the better good of the net by getting rid of as much of that garbage that was never meant to be as possible, if you want a real opionion ask the inventor of WWW Tim Berners-Lee he will gladly support your position.
posted by stbalbach at 5:45 PM on May 14, 2004

While I generally agree with jammer here, I'm going to have to say that my preference—and one that I am following in a book due out in July—is to leave off the http://. This is despite fully understanding Mars's ranting, and fully understanding the del.icio.us statement. Here are my reasons:

1. Leaving off the http:// is, to me, like leaving of the "email:" in front of an email address, which so many people seem to want to do on business cards. Everyone knows it's an email address: it has that familiar monkey's tail and the .com/.net/org/.edu/.info at the end. In the same way, http:// is an irrelevancy, no matter whether the same host is also offering FTP, IRC, NNTP, or whatever services. It *looks* like a web address. Anway, as stalbach has written as I write this, HTTP is the default, and is tried first by the browser. Only the other protcols need to be specified before the address, and if you're putting an FTP address in an advertisement, then Vishnu help you.

2. The hostname being represented in your work, Cowboy Sally, is *not* some absurdity like del.icio.us. It's *.nyu.edu. It's clearly a host name, and not a new first name that someone in La La Land has taken on after their first Kabbalah-n-crystals guru session. The leave-off-the-http:// should be decided on a project-by-project basis, so that when you do encounter a list of mixed protocol URIs, you can shove off the hobgoblins of consistency and do what that project needs done.

3. Nobody gives a damn about URLs. Printed URLs get a response rate on the order of 0.01 percent, no matter how you prefix them. The charm is off. They're mostly decorative, and the only consistent message they communicate is, "We're here with you in the technological present." You could put learn.to.fly.in.our.library.nyu.edu and nobody would care, and few would notice.
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:50 PM on May 14, 2004

http:// was never designed to be used by humans it is machine language

The history is irrelevant. The arguments for using it now are stronger than those against. At any rate, we use it in my editorial department.
posted by languagehat at 6:18 PM on May 14, 2004

http:// looks OK if and only if the slashes are kerned. I even do it in monospaced fonts (chiefly Thesis). At some point, type designers are going to make custom kerning pairs that spare us the trouble.

If you have to use it, at least don't pretend that the slash is some kind of free-standing character. http:// is a single unit; make it look that way.
posted by joeclark at 6:32 PM on May 14, 2004

Mo Nickels: http://del.icio.us/ is not an absurdity, but an excellent example of how leaving off the "http" could be confusing to non-savvy readers (no "www", no familiar suffix), and one that made me change my mind about leaving the "http" off at all times.

And: No one cares about printed URLs? While URLs in a commercial magazine may not be effective, they are highly relevant and useful for presenting additional or updated material in student handbooks, technical manuals, etc.
posted by o2b at 6:41 PM on May 14, 2004

I leave off both http:// AND www. if I am referring to a website in plain text and the suffix is .com or .edu and it's not meant to be clicked. If confusion is possible, I add back what is necessary or rephrase the sentence.
posted by mischief at 7:12 PM on May 14, 2004

learn.to.fly.in.our.library.nyu.edu

Ouch.
posted by Vidiot at 7:16 PM on May 14, 2004

Well, not really here nor there, but if you turn your documents into PDF and then use the Adobe Acrobat tool to turn urls in the document to hyperlinks, it will ignore anything that doesn't begin with http:// and you'll need to make the hyperlink manually ... which I discovered this week when converting a client's document for their website.
posted by crunchland at 8:25 PM on May 14, 2004

Drop the http:// *and* the www if people know that your site is, say, northwestern.edu (my alma mater). Northwestern tends to do stupid stuff like www.cas.northwestern.edu, which just drives me insane, and is just another reason I will not donate to them.
posted by gramcracker at 9:26 PM on May 14, 2004

It [http://] is built into the browser, you don't need to enter it.

That's been true only since about 1995, when browsers started letting you enter URLs without the protocol. Before then, users had to type 'http://' every time they went to a website, and so they knew that 'http://' meant 'website'. These days, I don't think any casual users ever type in 'http://'. They recognise web addresses primarily by 'www.' and/or '.com', not by the 'http://'.

Because of this, will adding 'http://' to an otherwise inscrutable address really trigger "that's a website"-type recognition in a non-technical audience? Does the average reader recognise 'http://' as an indicator of 'website'-ness?

Is 'go to http://del.icio.us/' any clearer to your grandmother than 'go to del.icio.us'?

Whatever you end up printing, some people are still going to try to go to "www.del.icio.us.com" or email "del.icio.us@.com". (Did you know that some people still visit sites by typing web addresses into the Yahoo! search box? Amazing but true.)

So unless you're printing a step-by-step guide ("Double-click on the big blue 'e'..."), you have to assume a certain amount of web-savvy-ness in your audience. I think that 'Go to...' or 'Visit our website at...' is enough of a hint.
posted by chrismear at 1:52 AM on May 15, 2004

Mo Nickels: http://del.icio.us/ is not an absurdity, but an excellent example of how leaving off the "http" could be confusing to non-savvy readers (no "www", no familiar suffix), and one that made me change my mind about leaving the "http" off at all times.

Great. When NYU starts promoting del.icio.us in its web materials, then they can start using the protocol prefix. As I said above, this should be decided on a project-by-project basis. Or when del.icio.us starts mass-mailing. Or newspaper advertising. Or promoting itself on Bazooka Joe wrappers. (The "absurdity" comment wasn't a ding against the web site, just against the URL, which is a funny-once).

And: No one cares about printed URLs? While URLs in a commercial magazine may not be effective, they are highly relevant and useful for presenting additional or updated material in student handbooks, technical manuals, etc.

Again, case-by-case. CASE BY CASE. This is not a use-case. As someone who comes from a technical background, I understand perfectly well what you're saying, but I also understand that the battle is lost. I've seen too many users do this: "www.http.www.yahoo.com" because the think they know that a web site address has to begin with www, but they also think they know that http is supposed to be in there somewhere. So even if you do include the protocol, you're not helping the lowest-skilled users—the ones the pro-protocol-inclusion crowd seems to be suggesting are too stupid to recognize an URL when they see one unless it is prefixed by the protocol.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:59 AM on May 15, 2004

Hey, thanks all! Good stuff. I think both sides of the argument have strong points.

We italicize URLs. Some of our URLs feature "www" and some don't. Some of our clients absolutely do not want "http://" in front of their web addresses. None of the publications I'm working on are Web- or .pdf-based. And all of our addresses have ".edu" at the end. So with that in mind, I'm tempted to argue against using "http://", hobgoblins be damned. We'll see--it's a bit of a quixotic mission.

And Jebus, don't even get me started on "log on."
posted by cowboy_sally at 6:35 AM on May 15, 2004

My paper's style is to drop the http:// with addresses in www.X.com format, and retain it otherwise. The thinking is that people recognise www.X.com as THE indication of a web address, and http:// clears the confusion up if it's not there.

And we set it in a different font.
posted by bonaldi at 6:37 AM on May 15, 2004

learn.to.fly.in.our.library.nyu.edu

Mo, thank you for this. Just thank you.

(What do you think of kids.stay.free.in.our.library.nyu.edu?)
posted by cowboy_sally at 6:38 AM on May 15, 2004

people are so willfully stupid about the internet that it just behooves using whatever will work, when typed in verbatim by a totally internet unsavvy person, and to use it consistently. my father calls emails addy's "web sites". friends often thank me for "sending them pictures" when i never sent any pictures, i sent a url where they could view pictures. in fact, the same people have often remarked that they can always "see" the pictures i "send" them, and often cannot view the pictures other people send them, and want to know what the secret is!

listen - you, if you are reading metafilter, are better informed with regard to internet than 99.9999% of the population! as such, you are in a piss poor position to judge things like "anyone would recognize" something as a url. while my inner pedant screams out support for mars saxman's comment, the fact is many people often see "http://this.that.andtheotherthing.blah" as indecipherable gobbledegook which they will never bother attempting to type. so i guess my position is "do what works", which isn't very helpful, i suppose...

oh, and i hate that "log on to..." crap as well. but it makes people feel like george jetson, so it's not going to stop...
posted by quonsar at 7:20 AM on May 15, 2004

Ditto about logging on. I've even heard "click on" or "click on over to" our web site. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a forward slash. There are slashes and backslashes.
I prefer to drop http://www. whenever possible, and definitely drop at least the http:// part just because modern web browsers are smart. Every browser I have on my computer understands what I want to do when I type "apple/trailers" or "richmond/dining".
A few years ago I was working for Vegetarian Times and Better Nutrition magazines, and the stylebook our new editorial staff developed used my suggestion of shortening web site addresses whenever possible. I lost the battle for keeping the hyphen in e-mail, though.
posted by emelenjr at 9:30 AM on May 15, 2004

hey, at least it wasn't hey.rich.jersey.girl.sell.coke.in.our.park.nyu.edu...
posted by Vidiot at 10:21 AM on May 15, 2004

Are you offering friendly, informal advice, or are you making a citation?

Compare these two:

"Visit us at www.example.com, click on Lunch Menus, and examine our tasty selection of pies."

"The document is located at http://www.example.com/reviews/pastryguidelines.pdf"

Citations should includeaccurate URLs, including trailing slashes where appropriate. AskMeFi is http://ask.metafilter.com/ with a trailing slash. If you want to tell someone informally how to get here, go ahead and tell them ask.metafilter.com . But--if you just want to talk about it, don't use any of these, just call it "Ask MetaFilter". If you want to refer to this thread, use http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/7259 (it's not clear to me whether the trailing slash is most appropriate here, so I leave it off in deference to the site's own usage).

When I have to describe a website or a page within it, I run through this hierarchy:

1. content of the TITLE tag

2. content of H1, H2, etc., or an obvious graphic banner or the ALT attribute associated with it

3. the domain or URL

4. "something I make up" if all of the above are unusable, unwieldy, or somehow ridiculous
posted by gimonca at 10:24 AM on May 15, 2004

I think the test should be whether you can get to the site without puttting the http:// into the browser. You can't, right? Then you should put the full address, as others have suggested, in parentheses. evilbeck was right that you shouldn't give much credit to most people when it comes to dealing with such things - they'll not be able to figure out the http:// without you telling them; they'll try www., though.
posted by Dasein at 10:36 AM on May 15, 2004

One last thought:

I regularly see people appending "www" to any non-www-prefixed domain, whether it's written with or without the "http://" material.

Despite this, I prefer the non-prefixed domain style in print (especially in copy, but only for domains). However, I effectively work case-by-case.

In email, I always include the prefix in order to enable click-ability. I general, I expect that to become dominant in print, especially for specific URLs.

(Or URIs, I guess we're supposed to say these days. What a non-improvement.)
posted by mwhybark at 6:52 PM on May 15, 2004

the original question was "We want to direct prospective students to a particular area of our Web site".

If they're too stupid to know that foo.university.edu is an address, then they're too stupid to go to your university. Keep this nomenclature - it's doing you a valuable service by weeding out the hard-of-thinking.
posted by Pericles at 10:45 AM on May 16, 2004