Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 09/29/07 11:47

Scripsit Blinky the Shark:

> I'd classify this along with those. Naturally my first knee-jerk
> response was "deception", but it doesn't seem very deceptive to have
> the user directed to a URL that he's likely to plainly see on
> hovering and which is just as visible in the anchor as is the href.

It might be intended to deceive search engines rather than users directly.
But such deception, too, is ultimately aimed at deceiving people.

I have to disagree with your note somewhat, though. The "tooltip" effect is
not ubiquous, it is not required by any specification, etc. Neither is the
"status line" effect (displaying the URL in the browser's status line on
mouseover), but it's something that _has_ been meant for showing the URL,
whereas the title attribute is not meant for that but for use as "advisory
title".

The direct deception, whether intentional or not, arises from the fairly
natural user behavior of looking at the status line to see the URL.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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