IE8 Developer Tools Tips & Tricks - #5: Find Link Paths

Cloaking hyperlinks is a cunning trick that comment spammers & phishing attackers use to ride on the popularity of websites that are in the good books of search-engines. If you run a public website that allows comments or accepts input, you should keep an eye on URLs submitted by users that could be cloaked under unsuspecting hyperlink text.

Developer Tools has a nice feature called Link Paths that will show the URLs corresponding to hyperlinks on a specified page as labels overlaid on the link text. You can also have it generate a report of all Links in a page. This can also be helpful while debugging a database-driven web page that you may have built with dynamic URLs based on values retrieved from a database.

To try this feature, open Developer Tools from the menu or using the keyboard shortcut F12 after you have opened the web page whose hyperlinks you want to inspect. From the View menu, select Link Paths. Switch to the web page and you will see the actual URLs as labels wherever links are present. From the same menu, you can choose Link Report to have a complete list of links on the page generated for you.

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