I'm archiving a site, and I want to generate a PDF of the pages. Several of the pages have links in them, but I do NOT want these to be output as links, because many of them are likely to be broken. Instead, I want them to be output as text, and so I've set up my page to convert links to things like this:

<span class="url">http://www.google.com/</span>

However, when I'm running prince, the PDF that is output turns that into a link, so it is clickable. I don't want that. How do I stop it?

Another part of the problem is that many of the URLs are quite long and run onto multiple lines. When they do, the first part of the link is converted into a link, and the text on the second line is ignored. This is resulting in something like "http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8618" linking to "http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/" (broken) and "releases/story.php?id=8618" being relegated to the following line (unlinked).

Or is it the PDF viewer that is automatically linking the text, and not Prince?

Prince will not generate a link for the span element, however some PDF viewers will try to be clever and interpret any text that looks like a URL as if it was a link.