Hacker News Reader

Comment by Timwi | Hacker News Reader

I read through the whole page from the beginning up to the “Discussion about this post” header. At no point was there any mention of a series, or any other blog posts (the inline links all go to Wikipedia).

I don't blame anyone for not realizing that there are more articles on the topic.

View on HN

At the very start of the post:

> At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode.

With link to an article.

Correction to the correction: with three links to the three articles.

Linked in a the style where each word links to _a_ _different_ _page_ that doesn't correspond to the hyperlinked word.

What do you call this pattern? It seems to be popular lately. I haven't been able to find a description of it, but it would be much more helpful to the reader if it was identified.

Instead of

> At the beginning of the year, I wrote a _bunch_ _of_ _articles_ on the various trick

It's better to write

> At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles (_1_, _2_, _3_) on the various trick

or something similar.

It bothers me too, in the same fashion as “click here”. Instead, we should prefer e.g.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks (_below 1MB_, _above 1 MB_, and _with GNU JMP_)

Just describe the content you’re linking to. You know best as the author!

I intentionally wrote it that way because these articles are only loosely related to the one discussed here, not a "series I thought through upfront". Yeah, not a fan _of_ _the_ _pattern_, but I wanted to give it a try and see how it worked. But honestly... the text of the very first sentence talks about these articles, so the curious reader will hopefully realize that "there is something more".

IIRC, this linking pattern was common enough back in the Geocities era, that HTML style guides explicitly recommended avoiding it. To those who lived through these times, it's quite obvious that there are three separate links, because the space between the words is not underlined (the space would be underlined if it were a single link); obviously, that trick is not helpful with the modern style of not underlining hyperlinks at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com