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 09:16:13 UTC