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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 05/17/07 12:56
Scripsit Mason C:
> It's time for my biennual plea.
Does "biennual" relate to "bi-" and "ennui"?
> My browser button that reveals the links is needed much too often.
Pages that hide links are seldom worth visiting, still less studied for
their links. If you spend your time doing such things, then that's an
interesting hobby.
> Maybe I'm missing something: is hiding the links some kind of
> sophisticated video game?
Are rhetoric questions some intellectual game?
> id: http://masonc.home.netcom.com
I don't think link hiding is at its worst there. True, the unvisited link
color deviates from the common default and, worse still, link color does not
change for visited links. Visited links get a grey background, so they are
more or less _highlighted_, which works against usability principles. But it
is _relatively_ easy to guess which texts are links, once you have decided
to waste 10 or 15 seconds of your life on the page (which is too much, given
the rather obvious lack of structuring, theme, and keynote text).
Of course, _some_ of the links have been hidden in a rather nasty way, as
one can immediately see by using the advanced cluelessness detector, Lynx:
Javascript is off.
Menus will not work.
(The "Valid HTML 4.1!" icon is not a link, so it's not an example of hiding
a link - just an example of foolish contamination of pages with pompous
symbols that have a negative value to visitors. Only the small fraction of
visitors that is interested in _authoring_ pages and specifically interested
in validity will get the clue that the page is probably _not_ valid, if they
have tested a few pages that claim validity. It's usually not a deliberate
lie, just ignorance or carelessness.)
So it's an example of amateurishly and foolishly messing up links and hiding
them, but surely there are even more striking examples.
Followups trimmed to alt.html.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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