Some of how you answer this question has to do with how a user would
get to a desired file. Are they searching or sorting or both? If
sorting, can the sort be by file type?
Basically, how does including information about a file's type help
the user find and choose a correct file? If the file
I built a site for a client a while back with a lot of links to PDFs,
Word docs, etc. At the time, I understood the best practice was to
identify the link type and document size in parens after the link:
2007 Strategic Report [256kb PDF]
but I'm starting to feel like this junks up
Is the file type and size going to be a decision factor as to which
file they download, or is it just informative?
What about hiding them until mouseover? I just did a quick CSS
experiment using a span inside the to make the file type and size
and same as the bg colour, and therefore invisible,
Kim, you may consider using a 'mouse over' effect, in such a way that
the information about the file type and it's size would appears only
when the mouse pointer is over the link.
This way you would still have the information, but it wouldn't
clutter the interface. The 'cons' of this solution is
These are good points. I always like to know whether I'm about to
download something before it happens, which is why I wanted to
distinguish between links that go to another site versus links that
have a file behind them. Since I don't know whether users have PDF
plug-ins to their
