A Pattern from the HTML Pattern Language at Anamorph

Readable Documents

All the documents at this site are written almost entirely in English sentences or sentence fragments. This is true even for the indices at the tops and bottom of the pages, and for the hyperlinks within the text.

It's already accepted Web wisdom that hyperlinks shouldn't be worded "click here". Why is this? I'm not sure, but I suspect that it has to do with switching between different uses of the same language. "Click here" takes you out of the flow of the text and moves you into navigation mode; you're still reading English, but the way the language is being used has suddenly changed. This seems to be disorienting in some small way, but I'm not sure why.

And the fact is that links worded this way aren't necessary, since links are differentiated from the rest of the text by color. So when navigating through documents at this site, there are no links that read Up, Back, Next, Top, etc. This seems to me to be the next step after avoiding "click here"'s.

I will point out that pages of books don't contain instructions that read "turn the page", and that the title of The Grapes of Wrath isn't The Grapes of Wrath Book.

Therefore, write your text documents as if you were creating printed text in your native tongue, and look for the natural hyperlink phrase in the text you've written. It will almost always be there; if it isn't, tweak the text.


Related Patterns

Known Audience
Readable Indices
Readable Hyperlinks
Document-Format Consistency
Node-Based Documents
Document-Content Listing
Consistent Headers and Footers


Discussion


References


A Pattern from the HTML Pattern Language at Anamorph
Last Updated: May 17, 1995. Created May 17, 1995
Copyright 1995 Robert Orenstein. Your Comments are welcome: atempaddress@netscape.net