URLs
Q. If a website breaks at the end of a line in type where a period occurs, does the period belong at the end of the line or at the beginning of the next line? Answer »
Q. Dear Q&A, We are an undergraduate academic library where students access most of the articles they cite from online databases such as EBSCO HOST Academic Search Premier. Our faculty would like to know how you would suggest citing articles from this source, as the URLs on these databases are not persistent. Thank you. Answer »
Q. A recent article in the Washington Post (“On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral,” by Rick Weiss, November 24, 2003) reports that URLs often become obsolete. It also says that there are lots of errors even in citations to conventional sources. What’s a researcher to do? Answer »
Q. I noticed an article about the new CMOS that referred to this Web site address without the “www.” See University of Chicago Magazine, August 2003, page 40: “A new Web site (chicagomanualofstyle.org) . . .” In the office where I am a textbook editor, we have been having a rather heated debate about whether you can just delete the “www” from a Web address. My position is that if the “www” is part of the Web address, then the “www” should be included in any printed reference to the Web address. Everyone else has decided that the “www” is superfluous. It is now our style to delete the “www” from all printed Web addresses. However, when I typed “chicagomanualofstyle.org” into my Web browser, I got an error message. When I typed “www.chicagomanualofstyle.org” into the browser, it immediately went to your Web site. For this reason, it seems to me that as long as some Web addresses do not work if you do not type in the “www,” then it should be included. Answer »
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? Answer »
Q. (cont’d) Thank you! I’ll try to find out how to set my browser to turn off the lines. I use MS Word and am looking for a way to turn off the underline. (I am not using HTML.) Answer »
Q. Have you established any rules for breaking Web addresses at ends of lines? I would be inclined to break at the slash where possible, with no hyphen (keeping the address intact), but what about the “dots”? Example: eic.edu.gov.on.ca/html/dsbmaps.html (I’ve got another one that’s a line and a quarter long!). Answer »
Q. Should a sentence that ends with a Web-site address end with a period that is not part of the address? I am concerned that people who are not familiar with how URLs work might have trouble finding a site if they assume that the final period is part of the address. I have the same concern about putting a Web address in quotation marks. Have you found any effective way of making sure people will be able to tell Web-site addresses from surrounding punctuation? Answer »
