Don't Click Here
82 points by lr0
82 points by lr0
This is good, simple advice. I remember similar discussions about HTML copywriting thirty years ago, and regularly since, so I wonder why the bad examples prevail.
I think people conflate buttons (which are usually labelled with an action, "Post" for example) and links on web pages - especially when they are building. I have been following this advice from this article for years and I still talk to developers about how the context of a link is different than a button.
It won’t ever go away because it takes thought to craft a descriptive link vs just writing “click here.”
What's this about? it says not to click it :D
Yeah, I expected it to be about phishing.
That's why I don't think it is a good idea to use this kind of "cute" title. Ironically, the title makes the same kind of mistake the article warns against (by having a non-descriptive title that we don't know whether we should click).
The MDN page of anchor element also gives you the same advice.
The content inside a link should indicate where the link goes, even out of context.
Assistive software has shortcuts to list all links on a page. However, strong link text benefits all users — the "list all links" shortcut emulates how sighted users quickly scan pages.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/a#accessibility
Assistive software has shortcuts to list all links on a page
Not only them. I'm pretty sure the old Opera browser had that feature too.
Very very yes. Also:
Imho, changing the colors is fine as long as they aren't subtle.
Also an obvious navigation menu is also fine to have non-underlined links.
Oh and easter eggs should look like regular text, obviousy :D
Apart from that i agree: Links should be obvious, boring and unexpected.
This advise was taught to me when I learned web dev as part of accessibility. It's one of those subtle things you probably won't think much about until you learn about it
Same here. In 1999.
It wasn't just for accessibility, but also for indexing. Google's original page rank used the text of links to identify the things that the link was relevant for.
I do wholeheartedly agree with that, however, I've seen that for regular people, "click here" is unmistakable, while "go to your account" is confusing. I guess that's why many websites are doing it "wrong".
The main pattern I see in the examples is to use noun for the link text; the place the link goes. e.g. "your account", "the changes". They also use the intended outcome as link text, e.g. "unskip your meals". I prefer the former when the destination is multi-purpose, and the latter when it's single-purpose.
This is a tangent, but I don't want to let "unskip" go unchallenged. To skip something is to not do it, and "un-" with an action means to cancel it. So, if you cancel not doing something, then you're doing... what exactly? "Unskip your order" is nonsense.
I would have written "If you want any of these scrumptious meals, [[re-place your order]] by Wednesday."
Unskip makes more sense to me than re-place in this context.
Assuming this is a recurring subscription of some sort, skipping a shipment is taking the action, and unskipping is to undo that and return to the neutral state.
One interesting thing I realized recently is that even Markdown allows you to add titles to links. For example, see the spec. I'm not sure how this affects accessibility. Maybe it's a good way to add links that flow well into prose, yet still preserve useful information?
I'd like to know how screen readers behave with link titles. As I understand, screen readers might allow users to cycle through a document's links. If in this functionality they read titles instead of link text, I see link titles might be a good tool?
(However, in normal browsers, I dislike hover as a means to show information :(
[I also learned a trick with link reference defintions. You can have a Markdown document that is composed only of link reference definitions, that you can then include from many documents and use to have consistent links throughout long documents, in a short form.]
Huh, TIL link titles were even in John Gruber’s Markdown https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link
We're such madpersons. First thing we all (probably) did was clicking the link to the article!