Notes from the Coalface: Pasting URL's with pretty title

[TW Tones]

Folks,

I just stumbled upon something helpful. You may know how to copy a permalink to a tiddler, this results in URL, and using the to clipboard option is help full. the only problem is the result is an ugly URL with encoding.

I discovered today however if you have Control Panel > Settings > Tiddler Titles set to Display tiddler titles as links, there is a a better choice. Or where every you see a link in a tiddler eg  Learning [[Learning  |https://tiddlywiki.com/#Learning]] copt that with you mouse.

If the titles are displayed as links highlight and copy the title with your mouse. The result if pasted is well formatted link eg; Navigation History. It is not helpful pasting into tiddlywiki,  I will raise an issue on this. But it is helpful pasting links into email and forum posts. As I have done here.

Regards

Tones

[TW Tones]

I have raised an issue here in github, if you support this please thumbs up and comment.

Tones

[The Islander]

Although the link text looks nice, hover over it and look at the URL. Yuck!

[Charlie Veniot]

Yuck how?  What's a non-yuck URL?

Understanding, of course, that yuck is in the eye of the beholder, and that URL's are first about being successful at getting to something on the web.

I ask because of the potential for me to gain a new insight into how different people see things.

[TW Tones]

Charlie;

Use the permalink button you get https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#Sort%20Filter%20Run%20Prefix thats Yuk in my view

Now control Panel, settings > tiddlywiki >  Display tiddler titles as links

Now open the tiddler and highlight the title and copy, then past here Sort Filter Run Prefix

Thats not yuck

I think you may see it aint the beholder, its universal. Especially if you want to see the yuck one just mouse over.

Regards

Tones

[Charlie Veniot]

"Although the link text looks nice, hover over it and look at the URL. Yuck!"

Thanks, but I still don't understand where The Islander was going with that.

A URL is a URL.  Not quite sure how it could be made prettier, or why it would matter when the link is pretty.

[strikke...@gmail.com]

Charlie,

I do not understand either. I find pretty links nice, but I also find it handy to be able to hover them and see where the link in fact are going to. Not all pretty things turns out to be gold. Luckily that is how it works ;-). Not Yuch, handy.

Birthe

[Soren Bjornstad]

I agree with Tones, URLs should be human-readable when possible...if they're not, they're ugly. That means they consist of actual words, not internal IDs and random strings of characters, when possible, and you can tell what each component in the path represents. A bunch of URL-encoded nonsense with %20 and so on is only human-readable if you know a lot about text encoding, and even then it's going to slow you down. There was a time in maybe the early aughts when most URLs were an unreadable mess, post titles used their ID numbers in the database, there were usually giant strings of query parameters after ?, etc. Then people got wise and started prioritizing URLs that people can understand and type again (maybe partly because search engines started taking that into account for ranking purposes).

But I think we're mixing up two concerns in this thread, the link text and the actual URL. Raw URLs are uglier than text explaining where they go in most cases, but that's a different question from the URL itself. In Tones' example, the actual URL is the same in both links (though I'll note my browser does convert the %20's to actual spaces on mouseover). 

[Charlie Veniot]

Um, there was no disagreement in this thread with Tones.

Tones' initial post was about getting pretty links when the URL encoding are ugly.  I think that's great.  (Already a usual habit of mine, just grabbing them links from the "Open" sidebar tab instead.) 

I'm just trying to understand The Islander's subsequent post. And now your post as well.  Where Tones is suggesting a nice way to provide links (kind of abstracting the URL encoding), are you both suggesting that it would be better to instead change URL encoding so they don't have things like "#" and "%20" in them ?

[Soren Bjornstad]

Um, there was no disagreement in this thread with Tones.

Tones' initial post was about getting pretty links when the URL encoding are ugly.  I think that's great.  (Already a usual habit of mine, just grabbing them links from the "Open" sidebar tab instead.) 

It sounded to me like Tones also had an opinion on the existence of "ugly URLs," which is why I responded from back there, but maybe that was just me misreading the post.

  

[A]re you both suggesting that it would be better to instead change URL encoding so they don't have things like "#" and "%20" in them ?

No, I'm suggesting that when one has an opportunity to choose the format of a URL, one should choose one that uses as few internal IDs and special characters (since those turn into %-encoding) as possible. (I don't see any problem with # in itself, that has a clearly defined meaning and isn't ugly.) I do not think that TiddlyWiki is doing anything wrong here – I was just trying to explain what some people might consider an ugly URL.

[CJ Veniot]

Yeah, I know what you mean especially with the %20's all over the place.

That can be fairly easily resolved by sticking with camel case for tiddler names.

I very much dislike camel case (cognitive annoyances) in my TiddlyWikis, so much so that I prefer live with those ugly %20's in links, to everybody else's very understandable chagrin.

Being an incessant Tiddler Title Tweaker (a 3T-er? a threeter?), I'm moving towards internal ID's as part of URL's, to prevent future link rot re distributed URL's (link rot caused by my "threeting".)  Yeah, I coddle my sanity, or maybe insanity, and wind up perpetuating ugly URL's.

Let's say I get what you mean, but I've surrendered to ugly URL syndrome as the easier to live with evil.  (thank goodness for the pretty links.)

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tiddlywiki/F-dQxKm4rds/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/783f4716-b5a2-4093-b5de-6484edbbb0a5n%40googlegroups.com.

[TW Tones]

Just to follow up

• At the moment the permalink to a tiddler copies the encoded url, if you paste this anywhere else you keep the encoded link. 
  • Click and it works however the pretty title is lost or non existent. 
  • This copy only ever captures the encoded URL
• If however you make the tiddler titles into links and copy that using select and copy, you can past this almost anywhere, email, GG, word and other Rich text environments
  • In some only the pretty link is pasted (not URL)
  • In many the link is pasted and is displayed behind the original pretty link (this is the most desirable)
  • In some including plain text fields eg tiddler text fields only the encoded url is pasted

What I would like;

• The existing permalink to do the equivalent of highlight and copy
• Provide the ability to drop/paste such links from the clipboard into tiddlywiki and capture both the link and pretty title
  • Ideally directly and to the [[prettylink||urllink]] form required by Tiddlywiki
  • Alternatively as a HTML a record <a href="urllink">prettylink</a>
• What I would like less
  • If necessary a mechanism to drop/paste into an intermediate mechanism
  • Another form of the permalink but with the desired copy behaviour.

Regards

Tones