HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Because “here” says nothing about what the link is used for, your poor visitors have to
search the text before and after the link itself to find out what's supposed to be “here.” In
paragraphs that have many occurrences of
here
or other nondescriptive links, matching
up the links with what they're supposed to link to becomes difficult. This forces your vis-
itors to work harder to figure out what you mean.
To Link or Not to Link
Just as with graphics, every time you create a link, consider why you're linking two
pages or sections. Is the link useful? Does it give your visitors more information or bring
them closer to their goal? Is the link relevant in some way to the current content?
Each link should serve a purpose. Just because you mention the word
coffee
on a page
about some other topic, you don't have to link that word to the coffee home page.
Creating such a link may seem cute, but if a link has no relevance to the current content,
it just confuses your visitors.
The following list describes some of the categories of useful links in web pages. If your
links don't fall into one of these categories, consider the reasons why you're including
them in your page:
Explicit navigation links indicate the specific paths that visitors can take through
your web pages: forward, back, up, and home. These links are often indicated by
navigation icons, as shown in Figure 18.18.
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FIGURE 18.18
Explicit navigation
links.
Implicit navigation links (see Figure 18.19) are different from explicit navigation
links because the link text implies, but does not directly indicate, navigation
between pages. Link menus are the best example of this type of link. The high-
lighting of the link text makes it apparent that you'll get more information on this
topic by selecting the link, but the text doesn't necessarily say so. Note the major
difference between explicit and implicit navigation links: If you print a page con-
taining both, you won't pick out the implicit links.
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