WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Current page - link or no link

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 1, 2005 7:40AM

On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Rimantas Liubertas wrote:

>> Sorry, but that sounds unbelievable. Did you hear this as first-hand
>> knowledge from someone who actually describes her or his own experience?
> <...>
>
> Unbelievable? Not for me. Poor navigation makes me to do the same too,
> sometimes.

Poor navigation or other things may cause people to be lost in hyperspace,
but the solution is to fix the navigation or other problems, not to create
additional problems.

If I follow a link and nothing happens (i.e. the page remains the same),
the natural expectation is that something is very wrong. The link does not
work, or the link the pointed to a wrong destination. Where is the right
destination? I know that misguided authors use self-referencing links, but
most users would be puzzled. And I know that authors also mistakenly set
up links that _unintentionally_ point to the same page. (After all, you
only need to write href="" and forget to put any address there. It happens
to me, too.
> Another case when linking current page may be useful is when pages is
> updates, e.g. has
> comments. Sure, one can use "refresh", but I prefer a link, especially
> in case I have posted
> a comment :)

This is a particularly good example of why such links should _not_ be
used.

A link to the page itself is _not_ a refresh button. A browser _should
not_ and _does not_ refresh the page, if the caching mechanisms indicate
that the page is cacheable. A normal user cannot know whether it is, so
he should expect that following a link to the page itself causes no
action, though it might refresh the page on Tuesday evenings if the phase
of the moon is favorable.

If you post comments, you need to learn how to use your browser to get the
refreshed page. Simple as that. Having learned this, you can use the
technique anyway, instead of using a technique that may sometimes work on
a minority of pages that have been misdesigned to contain self-referencing
links.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/