Re: Quality tips: ready for release?

On Sat, 2001-09-29 at 00:48, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> [...]
> > > In my opinion, the argument "but not everyone clicks!"
> > > is entirely the wrong reason for telling people not to use
> > > "click here."
> >
> > You're welcome to supply a replacement.
> 
> When Jason said that he couldn't find a problem with links with little
> contextual information, Al came up with a good reply that makes an
> excellent reference point for this discussion:-
> 
>    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2001Aug/0047


Without getting into the meat of that discussion, I would suggest those
with access to Internet Explorer 5 (possibly only the Mac version) try
the "Page Holder" feature. It uses the "sidebar" (a "frame" on the left
hand side of the browser window) to show all links in the current
document sans context (so you can click them and have the content appear
in the main browser window without loosing your list of links).

I, as a fully abled user that already knows the content of the page by
heart, tried to use this for <URL:http://validator.w3.org/dev/tests/> to
quickly run through all the test cases.

The contrast between the good links and the bad links is pretty obvious.


Those who make a 20-line XML parser in Perl to use an XHTML document as
a resource file format, where link text conveys not only minimal target
information but rather a complete sentence, would do well to keep that
in mind. There are several less esoteric applications for this kind of
link extraction and more ways to treat a web "page" then is immediately
obvious to Jakob Nielsen and the IBM tech-writer team. :-)

Received on Saturday, 29 September 2001 03:21:14 UTC