[quote post=”2673″]he image still has a link indicator, but it’s hidden underneath the image itself. This works primarily because all images in my content are padded uniformly (at 7px, not 6 or 8, don’t make fun of me).[/quote]

Well, 7 is a perfectly respectable number. :)

I may switch to image based link indicators at some point just to hide them on image links. :P

Instead of using a character and the :after pseudo-element, I use the icon solution from http://www.psyked.co.uk/css/auto-matic-link-icons.htm.
At first I was having the same issue with images, but one thing I tried is something like this:

#content a[href^="http:"] {display:inline-block;padding-right:14px;background:transparent url(/images/external.png) center right no-repeat;}
#content a[href^="http:"] img {margin-right:-21px;padding-right:7px;}

The image still has a link indicator, but it’s hidden underneath the image itself. This works primarily because all images in my content are padded uniformly (at 7px, not 6 or 8, don’t make fun of me).
Hope this helps.

@Jam: No problem – that’s why I post things here – so that people can use it if they want. :)

As for you question – I’m not sure what you mean, but I think the answer is probably yes. Do you mean something like:

or

If yes then you could totally do that. It won’t affect any of your old links that don’t have the class extlink.

This is fantastic :)
I’m going to have to use it on my blog.. if you don’t mind that is ?

And can’t just have something like:

and then have the code for the external link innbetween CSS tags that name it extlink?

Sorry if that is confusing, or just plain dumb :)

Jam

That would probably be an optimal solution, but keep in mind I have an archive consisting of approximately 5 years of daily posts. I could start putting the rel on external links today but it would not work retroactively without running some regexps on the whole archive.

I would also need to pre-process the incoming links in the comments to make sure the external ones are appropriately tagged. All in all, not a perfect solution. If I was starting a new blog today, I’d probably consider going that route.

from reddit

Why not just stick rel=”external” on the links and use a[rel=”external”] ? No “hacking” necessary.

furthermore, when your CMS processes submitted text, you could remove the rel from links that contain images. still semantically incorrect, i know, but it’s better than messing with classes.