URLs
Q. I notice that in your Q&A, not all of the URLs are underlined. Can you tell me which is preferred—underlining or not—when citing URLs in endnotes?
A. It is never necessary to underline URLs. Your browser probably underlines hypertext automatically, as the default; those URLs that you are seeing with underscoring are hypertext, and those without underscoring are unlinked by design (e.g., we don’t always link URLs that we present for purposes of providing an example or as part of a source citation). I prefer to set my browser to “hover” mode, so that the underline appears only when I move my cursor over a link. Also, your browser probably assigns a specific color to hypertext, a feature that can also be customized. Your electronic mail program, if it is set to read HTML, will probably turn any URL that I type or paste into the message into something that looks like a link (blue and underlined, most probably). So though I may simply type out http://www.nytimes.com/ with no special attributes, it might become active on your end.
