The Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub


	Making links to on-line AND entries
	1. What this page is NOT about
	This page is not about a method of locating things in the AND. If you are interested in looking up a word, you should either go to the main site where you can browse the headword lists, enter a headword or variant search term, or use the concordance to citations; or if you are mainly working on something else and would like simply to do basic occasional lookups in the AND, you could install our lookup tool in your browser and use that.

	2. Who needs this page?
	You need this page only if you want to insert "live" links to specific on-line AND entries which you have consulted, either on paper or on-line, into publications of one kind or another. What is described here is, in other words, a reference/citation procedure. Suppose you are writing a paper about Old or Middle French lexis and you wish to cite an AND entry and give your readers, if they have Internet access, the ability to consult that entry on-line without needing to navigate to the AND site and search for it. For example, you might want to say something like: " ..compare AND2 astele ..." in such a way that your readers, should they be using an Internet connected computer to read your piece either in a Web browser or in a an application (like Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word or Open Office Writer) that allows Web links to be called up, can simply click on the word astele in that example reference and be taken directly to the AND2 entry for it. If you do want to do that, please read and follow the instructions below. Warning: if you try instead to figure out how to do this yourself, or, worse still get a local Computing Adviser to tell you how to do it, you will probably create a link that doesn't work. If the way we ask you to make links is what IT pundits may call "non-intuitive" (= they don't understand it) this is not out of perversity on our part. The bane of attempts to use the Web as a serious scholarly resource is links that "die" without notice or explanation. The designers and editors of the on-line AND are determined not to inflict such ephemera on any users who take the trouble to link to the Dictionary. But to guarantee that links to the AND will not expire, we have to be a little strict about how you make them. If you keep your part of the bargain by linking according to our instructions here, we will be able to keep our part by ensuring that, no matter how we may in future reconfigure or relocate out servers, links made according to the method specified here will continue to work as expected.
	3. Linking to an AND entry: a worked example
	Supposing you decide you indeed wish to create a link to the AND2 astele entry. Provided you are sure that is indeed an AND headword (maybe because you have the print edition open before you), you can easily construct the necessary linking URL from first principles. All such linking urls begin like this http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/ All you need to add is the headword form. giving in this case http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/astele Put that into your document, incorporating it into a hyperlink, employing either the user-friendly methods such as Dreamweaver offers, or if you write your own html the hard way, by typing <a href="http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/astele">astele</a> and the job is done. It really is as simple as that. The only other thing you need to know is how to link to an entry whose headword bears a homograph number. That's simple too. Just append the number to the headword. So to link to, say, AND2 cas2 you would use http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/cas2 Don't be tempted to do anything fancy like trying to encode the superscript position of the homograph number. But if that number is the number one, please do remember to ensure that you have used a numeral one not a lower case letter L character. Of course if you prefer the under-the-hood approach, you may encode a superscript number on the text content of the <a> element if you so wish, like so: <a href="http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/cas2">cas<sup>2</sup></a> but don't try to put markup inside the href value itself. What about accents? Just put them in in the normal way (assuming your way of working is indeed sufficiently "normal" to have access to the very small set of diacritics used in AND headwords directly from your keyboard). Don't try to use é or &#xe9 or suchlike, and don't worry about encodings: the AND server will accept either iso-8859-1 or utf-8 encoding for characters with diacritics in external linking urls. If you aren't sure what that means, don't worry: you don't really need to know. And if a pundit tries to tell you about an alleged need to "uri-escape" your accents, take no notice: any browser to which that url is fed should do that nicely. Except, that is, if you are a programmer working at a really low level and trying to do your own communications with the AND servers over sockets instead of using an http client library. In that case, explicit uri-escaping may indeed be necessary, but it you know enough about http to operate at that level, you won't need any more prompting here about what needs to be done.
	4. How NOT to link to AND. Two very bad examples (and a good one)
	It may be that rather than constructing the linking url yourself and typing it in as outlined above, you would feel happier cutting and pasting it into place, taking the original from the AND site itself. Fine, but there are one right and two wrong ways to do it. Let's suppose you have brought up the astele entry on-line by picking if from the scrolling wordlist on the left-hand side of the screen, and you now want to find a link you can cut from the display and then paste into your document. What won't work is trying to create a bookmark to the page you are viewing, either by a keyboard shortcut, or by dragging and dropping from the browser's address bar, or by highlighting the address bar contents and copying them to the clipboard. That will give you a link, but not one that takes you back to astele. The other thing that won't work (although you can be pretty certain at least one local pundit will assure you it will, then blame the AND software implementers when it doesn't) is to right-click on a headword in the standard blue-background scrolling headword list, select "copy link location" or "copy shortcut" from the dropdown menu, then paste the resulting url into your target document. Nor will dragging and dropping the link itself on to your desktop or into a document you have open in another application work. Once again, you will see a url in your document, and if you try it out within a few minutes of creating it, it may even appear to work; but if you, or someone else reading your document, tries it again the following day, or the following year, it most certainly won't.
	However, the AND delivery system has been designed to generate cut-and-pastable links precisely to help people who would prefer not to type them in. To generate such links, you need to have visited the entry to which you want to create a link at least once in your session (oh, and you also need to have at least session cookies enabled for the connections with the AND server: see the privacy page if you think that may be a problem for you). Then simply choose the List Entries Visited link in the line above the headword list of the entry you are currently viewing. That will produce a list of links to the entries you have viewed in the left-hand area of the screen. Those links (as you will see if you inspect their contents) have been expressly formatted using the external linking method described in section 3 above. You may safely drag and drop any of these links on to your desktop or into another application, or you may cut and paste any of them, via the right mouse click and "copy link location/copy shortcut" method, into your document and create there a link to the entry concerned in the correct external format. You could even create a folder called "My Favourite AND Entries", or suchlike, on your desktop, and drag shortcuts to items from your Entries Visited list into that folder, building up a local collection of such links. These wouldn't contain the entries themselves (so wouldn't be usable if your Internet connection was down) but in the presence of a functioning connection they would always take you straight to the on-line version of the entry concerned. But please do remember: the technique described in this part of section 4 will generate correct and guaranteed persistent links only if applied to links generated by a List Entries Visited request.


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