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Comment by alexmuller | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't disagree more with the author about appended URLs being a problem. A print stylesheet is exactly when you want URLs to be displayed in the text of the page, because there's no other way to find out where that underlined text is supposed to be pointing.

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URLs should be displayed for sure, but inline is far too disruptive to smooth reading. I think it would be better done "reference style" if possible. Something similar to how it is done in markdown would be nice:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][1] than from [Yahoo][2] or [MSN][3].

[1]: http://google.com/ "Google"

[2]: http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search"

[3]: http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search"

CSS3 has support for footnotes in the page module.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-css3-gcpm-20111129/#footnotes

It adds a float: footnote; property. From reading that page, I believe this might work, once browser support catches up.

    a::after {
        float: footnote;
        content: attr(href) ' "' attr(title) '"';
    }

There are some other interesting additions:

    title { 
        display: none;
        string-set: title content();
    }
    
    @page { @top-left { content: string(title) }}

This will put the page title in the top left corner of the page margins.

It can also be simplified to "I get 10 times more traffic from Google[1] than from Yahoo[2] or MSN[3]." Note that I removed the square brackets from the URL text.

While this is information-lossy, the context of the link is nearly always clear from the text.

Footnotes work great for this, just like the olden days (or exactly like Wikipedia).

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