Can we have an example of this? By default, wordpress does not generate permalinks automatically. They are created depending on users needs.
Thread Starter
Anonymous
Certainly. If you go to fresh.wordpress.org, which appears to be using the default index template with no modifications, and hover over the entry title, you should see that it is a permanent link to the entry. Whereas Blogger sites such as Evhead and Belle de Jour will typically use the timestamp. Movable Type sites such as phil ringnalda either use the timestamp or a dedicated link saying ‘permalink’. Even Livejournal has ‘permanent link’ marked near the comments.
Only WordPress blogs use the entry title, which can be confusing for people who are used to finding the permalink at the bottom of an entry. So I was wondering why the default behavior differs so markedly from that of other blogging software.
1539
WP doesn’t use permalinks (by default) as was mentioned already. It gives the option to generate permalinks with a simple interface. There’s even an option to add a prefix (if you wanted ‘permalinks’ before the rest of the url you could use that).
I think the quesiton is why the default template links to the individual post page via the post title rather than anchoring to the time or to some “Permalink” text. The format of the permalink href is irrelevant.
I dunno, just ’cause.
Thanks for the clarification. I guess it’s because it makes more sense, and is practical. I tend to click on titles to get to a page with more about the title in any case. Not just on weblogs, but just about at any site.
For example, at http://www.cnn.com , I tend to click at the headline to get to the page with more details about that article. WordPress conforms to this, and make my life simpler. I don’t have to hunt for the Permalink link, like I have to on MT blogs, for example.
Thread Starter
Anonymous
Interesting. Would I be right in thinking that most WordPress users read only (or mostly) other WordPress blogs? The majority of blogs I read are either Blogger or MT-powered, so for the most part the permalink is below the entry, alongside the comments link. This seems logical to me, because the only reason I would need a permalink is to make a link to the entry in my own blog, furthering the discussion. But perhaps it only seems logical because it’s what I’m used to.
Interesting that you mentioned CNN as well; does that indicate the developers see this script as more for the ‘news’ section of a site than for a personal weblog?
I don’t understand why you’d have to “hunt” for a permalink when you know it’s going to be at the bottom of the post….
Thread Starter
Anonymous
Ah, but if he only reads WordPress blogs he doesn’t expect the permalink to be at the bottom. He expects it to be at the top, and doesn’t realise that this behavior is atypical outside the WordPress sphere.
Maybe it’s the way that other blog software handles permalinks that’s wrong; I’d just like to hear the thinking behind WordPress’s reversal of the convention. Unless there is no thinking, in which case I’ll continue keeping my permalinks at the bottom.
Well, I for one don’t like the timestamp being the permalink. Never did. That’s why, when I was using MT and now that I’m using WP, I modify the template so that the date AND time are together, right above the title, and there’s a permalink at the bottom in the “Posted Stuff” where most people expect all that stuff to be.
I find it interesting that WP implemented the UL LI structure (which is correct for lists anyway), long before anyone else and I now see that the latest incarnation of MT (3) now uses it.
Kinda makes you wanna go “hmmmm”!
Thread Starter
Anonymous
Thanks. In the absence of any rationale for the default behavior, I’ll move the permalink to the bottom of the entry where non-Wordpress users would expect to find it. I’d rather confuse the minority than the majority.
Anon, Blogger started that trend, I believe, and we all know how notoriously dodgy THOSE permalinks were. (Might have changed now that Blogger has spiffed up a bit; I haven’t used it in ages. But I know that a lot of Blogger blogs never seemed to have working permalinks.)
Thread Starter
Anonymous
The reason Blogger uses timestamps is because it didn’t originally support entry titles, and as you can have more than one post per day the timestamp was the best way to distinguish between entries. Movable Type introduced titles, but stuck with the timestamp permalink at the bottom, presumably because that’s what people were used to.
From a semantic point of view, surely a text link saying ‘permalink’ is the best choice, because it tells people what it is. I know the other kinds of permalink have ‘permanent link’ in the title attribute, but it is more transparent to the user to have it there in front of them. So that’s the way I’ve decided to go.
But what sense will a person who does not read blogs, and thus has no idea what a Permalink is make of a link that says only “Permalink”?
Also, there are as many links that say “Permalink” as posts on the page. What differentiates one of those links from the other?
WordPress makes a link from the post title, and the title for the link is set to be “Permanent Link: <the_post_title>” which makes most sense.
The semantic web is all about mark up and the web making sense to machines that read data. To the machine, a link that says “Permalink” , along with another dozen links that say the same, makes no sense, or is confusing at best.
What we have with the other tools is the senseless continuation of something that was born out of a limitation, as Anonymous says above, with regards to the Blogger permalinks.
Yes, and that’s just a furtherance of another annoyance, which is the blank or generic title where people don’t bother to actually title a page (or they don’t change the title from one page of their site to another). So if you Google something, you get quite a few very helpfully named “Untitled” pages!
Thread Starter
Anonymous
Of course the permalink will also have a title attribute explaining that it is a permanent link to this entry. If newbies are confused by that, there’s not much more we can do to help them. You could make the same argument about the ‘Edit this’ link that appears whenever you’re logged in; that text is the same for every entry too. How would you suggest handling that?
Personally, I think that anyone who needs a permalink already knows what it is, and that the purpose of a link saying ‘permalink’ is much more obvious than a timestamp or an entry title link that only reveals its destination when you hover over it.
Besides that, the permalink is meta or feedback information and from my point of view, the logical place for it is at the bottom with trackback urls, comments links and the like. I realise you are never going to agree with these points, but they are worth pondering.
