Are you linkurious?

But seriously, have you ever wondered what your life would be like if your links and anchors were more awesome? Like Wikipedia awesome? Well, Wikipedia is hideous, but you know how there are those little icon images after PDF links and stuff? That could by you! Oh snap!

Before you go off and marry the cheese (what?), allow me to splain. Links are how the web operates (the H in HTML stands for Hyptertext, which, to the uninformed neanderthal, means "links and stuff"), and, as such, should be immortalized by little pictures explaining where they go. Believe me. It’s called "progress".

I mean, do you really want your friends (assuming you have friends) to laugh at you because you built a website that doesn’t have cute little icons peppered throughout its pedantic prose? Absotively not. The only way to escape that ridicule is to use this little utility.

Admit it. Aren’t you feeling a little linkurious?

Are you?

Linkurious will automatically detect any links (<a> tags), divine the extension and add the cute little icons where appropriate. See the test page to see what extensions are mapped to what icons. It also detects certain URL schemes (mailto, https, ftp, callto, svn, svn+ssh, svk, cvs, bzr, git), and applies an icon to them as well.

The icons are actually one image, and the appropriate offset is determined by modifying the background-position CSS property (a sprite).

Under the hood, Linkurious only modifies inline inline-block anchors. It appends a 16x16 pixel span element with the appropriate background image to the anchor.

Linkurious has been exhaustively tested, once or twice, in the following browsers:

• IE5.5+
• Firefox 0.8+ (with some table-cell hackery)
• Opera 9+
• Chrome 1+
• Safari 3.1+

To use Linkurious, all you have to do is put a link to the JavaScript somewhere in your HTML. It’s that easy.

There are two options for implementation: gzipped or not gzipped. Safari does not support gzipped JavaScript (at least, Safari on Windows does not). Again, take a look at the test page to see what they look like in your browser and against several different background colors.

The icons used by Linkurious are from the most excellent LED Icon Set by Marcis Gasuns.

Regular:

gzipped:

Enjoy!

Are you still kurious? Have a question? Want to congratulate me on a job well done? Want to send me a death threat?