Re: What instead of click here?

Let's try this again.  It is not the intention to identify that it is a
link although that can be a plus for some.  It is the intention to
specify what to do and what will result in what you do.  This is why so
many links say "click here".  Perhaps to clear up bhe ambeguity, we
could say:
"This link takes you to a page where you can ask michelle a question"
but that gets kind of longish.  What is a shorter way to do this without
saying "click here"?

Think black and white monitor.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Ley" <jim@e-media.co.uk>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: What instead of click here?


David Poehlman:
>> [Ask Michel a question].   all as a link, it's clearer, it has
>> everything you need even if out of context of the page, and
>> doesn't include any device specific ideas.
>
> even better,
> "follow this link to ask Michelle a question." or some unambiguous
> alternative due to the fact that we need as much orientation as
> possible.

My UA does a perfectly good job of identifying a link, I don't see it as
being the job of the author to signify it's a link in text, the
structural A has already done that.

Consider again the list of links provided by a number of the above:
Follow this link to ask Michelle a question
Follow this link to ask Moomin a question
Follow this link to ask Snufkin a question.

It gets very laboured both visually and aurally, the "follow this link
to" provides no information, that's not implicit in the A tag (If you
really require that, it can be provided by your UA, it's not possible to
remove such text from my UA.)

Consider also a screen reader, such as Jaws would do with your
suggestion, My Jaws3.7 says
"Follow this link to ask Michelle a question. link", which seems to have
a high level of redundancy.  I've yet to see a UA which hides links from
users (it can be suggested by a page author, but all UA's can override
this.)

I can appreciate why you say that orientation is useful, but I think
it's
wrong to encourage usage which would be better served by trivial
education of the user, links are integral to the web, and I'm sure after
a few hours surfing the concept, and the implementations in the UA have
been learnt.

Jim.

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2001 09:22:50 UTC