notes on hyperlink style

[Kragen Sitaker]

I've been pondering how some of the blogs I read could be more
readable.  Some of them could benefit a lot from some improved
guidelines on linking.

- The best links are noun phrases describing either the page linked to
  or its subject matter, possibly even containing subordinate noun phrases,
  such as "a rebuttal", "the kits", "dozens of photos", "my post on the
  perils of sealing a class", "kooky information".  The best of these
  are as unambiguous as good HTML titles, uniquely identifying the linked
  page in the entire universe, and are clear about whether they describe
  the page or its subject matter.  Brevity is good, though, and this
  makes disambiguation expensive.
- The next best are verb phrases that describe the desires that would
  encourage a person to follow the link, such as "add comment", "see
  comments", "email the author", "Edit", or "download the source code".
  Sometimes these are better than the corresponding noun phrases because
  they're shorter.
- The next best are independent clauses that describe the page using
  some indexical term, such as "here", "there", or "this", apparently
  because the author couldn't figure out how to incorporate the link into
  the main flow of the text.  These are slightly better than "click here"
  because they aren't completely non-descriptive.  They could almost
  always be replaced with noun phrases with some gain in readability
  and navigability.
- The next best are simply the URLs of the linked documents; this is
  pretty crappy, but it's still better than the next few, because most
  URLs are somewhat descriptive.
- The next best are those with no useful text at all, such as "click
  here", an inline image, or some punctuation.
- The very worst are those that misleadingly describe something
  peripherally related to the linked page, such as its author's name
  ("Ted Neward" for a post about sealed classes) or how the post was
  created ("I posted here").  These subtract value not only from
  themselves, but also other links on the same page and links on other
  pages I look at around the same time, because I have to spend time
  guessing what they link to, usually by inspecting the URLs.

Don't mention web pages without linking to them.  It's obnoxious.

Lists of links (for example, to different formats of the same document,
or several documents on the same topic) challenge the guidelines for
link labeling.  Obviously repeating the same text over and over again
with slight variations isn't going to improve your documents.

Regardless of the link text, I hate useless links, like those that take
me to Yahoo's front page, www.gtk.org, slashdot.org, etc.  The worst
are those that take me to the same page I'm already on.

Also, links that go through some sort of link-redirector are obnoxious,
because I can't tell if I've already seen what they link to or not unless
I follow them.

Link titles are still underused, years after they became supported in
the mainstream.  While the ideal length for a link label is perhaps
between two and ten words, the ideal length for a link title is perhaps
between 10 and 50 words --- it lets you provide a sort of mini-abstract
of the destination document without cluttering up the source.  I think
this feature may be underused because it really requires a CMS with a
link registry to use it effectively.