Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2022 March 29

= March 29 =

Seeing where links lead
Sometimes when a page is written dynamically with Javascript, the browser will not display the URL of links in the status bar before they are clicked on. Example: a feed of archeology links. These links all lead to the same archeology blog on Blogspot. I can (and will) read that blog instead of the feed, but in principle it bothers me that blind links like this can exist. The page is provided by something called Feedwind, "a free RSS feed widget". I don't know whether the status bar is kept blank as an accidental side-effect of the dynamic page, or whether this is a deliberate attempt to defeat the ability to see where links lead. Even if, this time, it's accidental, it's surely done deliberately by some other websites. Is there any way to defeat the defeat of this fundamentally empowering browser feature? Card Zero (talk) 21:25, 29 March 2022 (UTC)
 * On Firefox you can do a right click; inspect. you can see there is a div with an onlcick and onkeypress actions that open a window with the url. In general however with javascript running, the url might be completely dynamic and only created after the click. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:24, 29 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that helped. I use "inspect" a lot (in Vivaldi) but get bewildered by it. I'd already had a look, but there were about four nested divs around the same item and I was looking at the wrong one. (And I don't know how to search this data - the source resulting from the script - for text such as "http" or "window.open", it's not like view-source where I get a flat page of text.) I wish there was an extension that shows what onclick is poised to do when mousing over an element. Card Zero  (talk) 23:04, 29 March 2022 (UTC)