Here are two sloppy writing habits that bug me today.
Raw URLs as Link Titles
Links should be inline and should have titles fit for human consumption. Which is easier to read?
Of course, both are better than failing to link the URL altogether.
Useless Summarization
I kid you not, today I ran across multiple occurrences of the following writing pattern. The topic has been changed to protect the author from public humiliation :). The pattern remains the same, with the emphasis on the galling part:
Before you can start processing the log files, you have to understand more about hashes, which I will explain now. Hashes are....
If you weren't going to explain it, dear author, why bring it up? Since it's so important to understand, why tell the reader to pay attention to the very next sentence which, if you'd ended the current sentence in the right place, he'd be reading already?
Maybe it's personal opinion or the fact that I'm stuck in a programmer's microcosm, but I don't mind raw URLs. To me, it's sometimes nice to be explicit about where a link goes. As an example of why this might be helpful, even though I didn't visit your Web site, I know where it is now (and I didn't have to hover over the link to find out).
The code that powers this site places the domain of the link's target in brackets (for comments, at least), so it seems that at least one other person agrees with me on some level.
Other than that, I do prefer that link descriptions (when they're not the URL itself) be relevant. I prefer "chromatic's homepage" to "here", for example.
Re:Raw URLs
chromatic on 2003-11-24T22:26:40
That's a reasonable argument. Perhaps I should have said "make links meaningful" and left it at that. On the other hand, there's much room to take advantage of the medium, especially as you can assign some semantic value to links. (See, that means using "click here" as a link title is still horribly wrong!)
Re:Raw URLs
delegatrix on 2003-11-25T03:38:53
<PSA>
And for accessibility, make links meaningful, especially when removed from the visual context of the page. This is effectively done with title attributes.
</PSA>Re:Raw URLs
jmm on 2003-11-25T14:50:50
The raw URL is especially useful when the page has been printed out on paper. The "meaningful to humans" URL is just tantalizing but useless in that context.
