Cultural Heritage

This train of thought started with helping to redesign the printed publicity leaflet for CILIP’s Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG). The design was looking good: it had brief wording of essential facts and a couple of images, plus a clear typeface that was left justified for accessibility.

Then someone noticed that the column width meant that a long URL was cut mid-word as it went on to a second line. We needed to split the URL at a better point, since reducing the font size to fit it all on one line made the text too small. So where should we split the URL?

First stop Wikipedia. Articles on URL and URI gave useful information on what they are and how they are constructed but nothing on print layout when quoting them.

An Internet search found references to citation rules such as the Chicago Manual of Style Online but I could only find information on what you need to include and in which order.

However, the same search led me to a post about best practice for URLs on the SEOmoz.org blog. There’s some useful information here and it’s well worth a look (and inspired the title for this post), though still not addressing the print display issue.

We didn’t find a definitive answer but having looked at lots of other examples, the group agreed to that it seems best to split at the division points – indicated by the forward slash as in:

http://www.cilip.org.uk/membership/how/

Has anyone else come across a definitive answer on this somewhere?