Context Free Links are Annoying

I’ve noticed a disturbing way of linking to multiple resources lately. For example in a recent post, Dave Winer made each of the words in the phrase “when we hit our stride” a different link. The reader is given no clue about what may lie on the other end of those links. At least put a “title” attribute in the link so hovering over them gives some clue where you’ll pop out on the other side. Or even better, write something like “… when we hit our stride (for example when I blogged about Blah, Foo, Bar, Baz , and Grop) …”.

Jakob Nielsen said “One of the greatest problems on the Web is that users don’t know where they are going when they follow hypertext links”.

This trend seems to be popular among bloggers, but one I’m hoping doesn’t last long.

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