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Comment by fwdbureau | Hacker News Reader

10 years ago, users could identify a link from underlined blue text or a highlighted blue border around pictures. We did so much visual progress since, and hover (especially in css) is good design and a good interface tool, in that it lets people know something might be clickable. For any user, hover means 'link', so i wouldn't start digging its grave anytime soon. Do we really need to break something that works here (mouse+display) because it doesn't work there (touchescreen)? somehow it doesn't make a lot of sense, and probably calls for more thinking

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Ideally, a user should not have to hover over something to know whether it is clickable. It is a designer's responsibility to make sure that a user can scan the page and know exactly what parts are clickable, so the user can quickly perform his or her desired action.

Ideally, yes, i agree with you. But when the site's users are not necessarily computer litterate, a few hints can prove helpful (sometimes it is also a designers responsibility to take people gently where they have to go). And for some playful designs, rich on graphics and taking the conventions a bit further, it can be complicated. <br> Hover also works as a confirmation: mouse pointers turning into a finger, that means 'yes, click'. This has been conventional for a very longtime, and it works. Watching touchscreen users tapping blindly on their ipad, checking what works and what doesn't, will probably become a frequent spectacle :)<br> But you know what would really annoy me with the disapprearance of hover? It's slightly like the bit.ly scenario, only worse, and it's unrelated to css or submenus: The mouse over a link have since ages showed the link's url. A reasonable part of the website-reading process is made of avoiding bad or irrelevant links, not speaking of nastyspamsite.com/fakeapp.exe addresses, and hovering hover links is capital. How do we do this on a touchscreen?

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