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RE: Repeating the same link phrase

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Sep 3, 2002 5:24AM

At 2:30 PM +0300 9/3/02, Jukka Korpela wrote:
>Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>> I can easily see link titles being
>> action verbs such as "download" -- I don't buy your rule of thumb.
>
>OK, let us agree to disagree on that. I suppose your implicit point here is
>that although any link is equally a "download" link and a "follow this
>and..." link, some links are more equally "download" links, i.e. they are
>primarily intended for fetching a resource and saving it onto local disk.
>They might even appear on a separate "Download area" page. But even then,
>does "Download" belong to the _link text_? I would say that not any more
>than "View" belongs to the text of a link that is mainly intended to provide
>access to a resource in visual presentation, such as a link to an image.
>Objectively, a "Download" prefix makes the link less useful in an alphabetic
>(or other) list of links, as a rule.

Well, the thing is that maybe it's clear in this case (although that is
debatable), but in other cases it is not clear. For example, in an
inline link or even an author's link (at the bottom of the page),
you might come across the word "Kynn" as the link text. It could be a
link to a profile page about me, it could be a link to my home page,
or it could be a link that emails me. I prefer to make it explicit
in the human-readable title what a link will do, and thus something
like:

<a href="http://kynn.com/" title="Go read Kynn's homepage">Kynn</a>
...
<a href="mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> " title="Email the author">Kynn</a>

I think the use of action verbs here is appropriate, especially
since it gives the sense of what the author would like you to do
with the link, instead of it just sitting there by itself.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett < <EMAIL REMOVED> > http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com
Next Book: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 http://cssin24hours.com
Kynn on Web Accessibility ->> http://kynn.com/+sitepoint


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