Vague links vaguely annoying

July 29, 2000 8:30 PM

It's kind of anoying when people link to things without any description of what's actually behind the link. That's sort of like "Click here", which is also annoying.

It would be nice if more people described the site/article/whatever they were linking to withen within the link text or the body of the post, or at least did a title="" attribute on the tag. Would save some time finding the interesting stuff, especially on those high-volume days.
posted by endquote to Etiquette/Policy at 8:30 PM (4 comments total)

I know, Netscape sucks, but my copy of Netscape doesn't take the title attribute.

Enough about me. I agree with this sentiment. I know I've pissed off at least one person who thought I was reposting the same information he already posted. But I checked recent posts, and his post was just too enigmatic for my little mind to comprehend.
posted by mrmorgan at 7:48 AM on July 30, 2000

heh, I don't think proper linking can be "legislated" but it seemed most apparent on the green ketchup snafu of a couple months back. The first person posted "this is going to make breakfast crazy" or something to that effect, and few hours later someone else posted "Heinz is going to make green ketchup, isn't that nutty?"

Two distinct styles covering the same topic. The second one makes more sense to the casual scanner of MeFi headlines, but it also lacks the imagination or humor of the first.

It's a fine line, I suppose title tags providing straightforward info for the obscure descriptions would help though.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:03 PM on July 30, 2000

Or hey, why not in the "Post an Item" page have a text box for "detailed information"

You can encourage users to fill it in with stuff like the "Heinz is going to make green ketchup" that accurately describes the link, but still leave the actual title and link description the way they left it.

Then, when you're pulling the info out of the database to dump it on the page, just throw that data into the title tag, and into a mouseover call that updates the status message.

to avoid the obvious huffuffle mangling the status bar will cause, through the entire URL into it too, so you get something like:

"http://www.cnn.com/news/whatever/silly/hierarchy.pl?CNNUSES-2345o987345345.html - Heinz makes green ketchup - your fries just got grosser!" in the status.
posted by cCranium at 12:49 PM on August 1, 2000