Citation, Documentation of Sources

Q. I’ve noticed in some of your Shop Talk posts that source citations are linked from a title instead of from an actual URL. But doesn’t Chicago require listing a URL in citations of online sources?

A. A blog post is different from a research paper or a historical monograph. In the latter formats, it’s generally important to record URLs in such a way that they might be assessed as such—and turned into links for a published version as needed. In an online forum like CMOS Shop Talk—unless the subject is URLs—it’s usually a bit more reader-friendly to take this:

Saller, Carol. “Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Creative Writing.” CMOS Shop Talk, April 20, 2021. https://cmosshoptalk.com/2021/04/20/gender-neutral-pronouns-in-creative-writing/.

and turn it into this:

Saller, Carol. “Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Creative Writing.” CMOS Shop Talk, April 20, 2021.

Readers can follow the link in that second version without having to face an eighty-character string whose main function is to tell a network where to go.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]