I read a lot of documentation and articles online. I consider myself an organized person, and if I find an article I really like or will need in my line of work later on, I print it, go over it with a yellow marker and store it with other articles of the same subject.
Today I was reading a really great article, The Quest for ASP.NET Scalability, by Michèle Leroux Bustamante and for the hundredth time noticed some hyperlinks rendered pointless when I printed this article. For example:
... See this MSDN article for more information on asynchronous Page handlers...
...This is done by implementing Web methods with an asynchronous design pattern (see this article on MSDN)...
No, I'm not picking on Michèle. She writes outstanding articles, but "This MSDN article" has no meaning on paper. That is something content editors/managers should take care of. This holds true for some bloggers whose text and link colors are almost the same, which, by the way, I see a lot. I can't even tell links from text because they also remove link underlines, so links blend with text.
The hyperlink wording has become very important lately. Search engines favor hyperlinks with meaningful and relevant wording. When I link to somebody else's blog post or article, I try to either copy their post title to help them get a higher page rank, or at least choose wording for the link that has something to do with their site. I think it's a matter of online courtesy.
Also, if you were to print my post I wouldn't want you to stare at dead-end "click here" or "see this post" links. In my recent article, Make Every Web Page Printer-Friendly, I explained how you can get CSS-compliant browsers, such as FireFox, Opera, etc (not Internet Explorer, sorry), print URLs next to each hyperlink so you can always go online and look up those references. This approach would give a tiny bit more meaning to "click here" links.
As an exercise, let's rework Michèle's references:
...See Fritz Onion's article Use Threads and Build Asynchronous Handlers on MSDN to for more information on asynchronous Page handlers...
...This is done by implementing Web methods with an asynchronous design pattern (See Matt Powell's MSDN article Server-Side Asynchronous Web Methods)...
Perfect? No, but at least I know what to look up and where.
Title Attributes Do Matter
To accommodate users with disabilities make hyperlinks accessible (as I outlined in my post Why Is It Important To Validate Web Pages?). Give hyperlinks meaningful title attributes. There's no exact definition of "meaningful" but think about it: screen readers rely on title attributes (among other things) to tell blind users what the hyperlinks are all about. A hyperlink that simply replicates its "click here" text is a waste of time. In reference to Fritz Onion above I built the link as follows:
<a title="Fritz explains how to build asynchronous handlers in
server-side code" href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/
06/Threading/default.aspx">
Use Threads and Build Asynchronous Handlers<a>
If accessibility is of little concern to you think of it from a selfish standpoint: Google is the largest blind user in the world. Do you want it to have a harder times making heads and tales of your makrup?
