does it specifically need to be coded?

Yes it does, unless there's something I'm missing, but, that reminds me, there was of course the other possibility -- of just having it break:

http://something/which/is/
too/long/to/display.htm

which leaves it onscreen so that someone could for instance copy it, but I don't know if copyability matters very much to people. You can always copy it by right-clicking or whatever.

Yes it does

Okay. So in that case what we're doing is discussing how we would want OUR code to work. Got it.

I'm assuming that the reason those things stretch out the browser windows is that the text-wrapping code in browsers doesn't know how to wrap a really long "word" where "word" is defined as a sequence of characters which doesn't contain any spaces or hyphens.

Some people's browsers may be able to, I guess, but not mine.

Anyway I've written a little function for ita to play with along the lines of:

function tweakURL(){
if(damn thing too long)
chop off everything after the third slash and make that the link text
}else{
leave it alone
}

which I'll email rather than paste here what with disappearing-slash issues and all.

It's so sad when the slash disappears.

I've just noticed, when trying to make an HTML list come out as

A)
B)
C)

that I can't, because Jon B's set an override for all List Items in the style sheet to

list-style-type: disc

(see end of second line) -- this is almost certainly a bug, in the sense of unintended feature, because it means that we can't have numbered lists or whatever.

I vote for that getting removed! Just the bit quoted above would do it.

Okay, I just got a real weird error message. Couldn't connect for a couple of minutes, then this:

September 28, 2002, 8:22 pm : ERROR [2] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) line 69 of file /home/buffist/public_html/classes/giles.php

September 28, 2002, 8:22 pm : ERROR [2] MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) line 69 of file /home/buffist/public_html/classes/giles.php

There has been an error. It's of the type we call fatal. Please don't be scared. You're not the one that's going to die.

Okay, where the $$?&(@#& are the developers?

That looks like the link was lost between the web server and the database server.

Yeah. It's working fine now, obviously, but it was weird. Mozilla just kept saying my connection was being refused by the server (and then asked, "OK?"), and Netscape gave me the error page.

I got a brief network thing going on too in the last five minutes or so. Just timeouts though, nothing interesting.

Should that error message say something like "cut and paste the error message above and send to dev@buffistas.org if it keeps happening" instead of just "where the $$?&(@#& are the developers?"?

Errors are trapped and written to a log. So there's no need to cut and paste.