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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Go to the [Amaya Website](www.amaya.com) is perfectly fine. I seriously have a hard time understanding what this w3.org article is trying to say.

A website is a website. To download is to download. The mechanics won't be 'abstracted away' just because you don't call them with the proper terms.

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This was the web between 1995 and 2002:

To see our latest news, click here, or click here if you want to request a catalog. The latest board minutes can be found by clicking here. Click here for product documentation. If you have any comments about our web site, click here to email us, or click here to call. If you were confused by this click here, or click here to let us know it met your expectations. Click here to see how many people have visited our internet web site.

On the plus side, there was actual useful content on the web, rather than the content-free designs that popped up in the Web 2.0 era.

Something to keep in mind is that a modern web page would be virtually unusable by the standards of 2002 and a 1995 web page would have been virtually unusable without the "click here" links. Conventions have to be established. While those blue underlined links may have had some precedent among some computer users (e.g. many help systems of the era used colored text to highlight hyperlinks), they would have little meaning to someone who bought their first computer to get on that newfangled Internet thingy. So while I agree that they were a bad thing over all, they were a necessary stopgap.

It takes less than five minutes for a person to learn how to click on links. They're a different color and underlined. It's obvious they are special. Despite "UX" being a discipline that actually exists, we've actually gone backwards on usability in that nobody can figure out what's clickable these days. For example... all those greyed-out pipe-delimitted links at the top of this comment. Despite its ubiquity for about 15 years now, at least once a month I have to teach someone that the ubiquitous three line "hamburger" menu is clickable.

Someone tell Wikipedia please, they have a weird sort of moving/hidden hamburger that floats which I've not seen anywhere else, I wonder if there's public stats on activity following the layout update.

Whereas if you removed the "click here" tags and associated text, you'd be left with:

> See our latest news, request a catalog. The latest board minutes. Product documentation. If you have any comments about our web site, email us, or call. If you were confused by this, let us know it met your expectations. See how many people have visited our internet web site.

Which imho is not any better, and arguably worse.

It's okay, though, you would most certainly have the main navigation menu repeated several times on the page. The new web master is learning this thing called Balinese Caligraphy or JavaScript or something along those lines and have even added a new drop down menu in two spots so it will be even easier to find the link to the page with the contact page and info on how to send us a fax to get a catalog mailed to them.

Click on of the following links:

See our latest news

request a catalog

Read the latest board minutes

Product documentation

email us with questions about our website

Call us

So a little indicator that these are links without "click here" and now the link text is very informative. But this would look like a menu.

In 2001 websites weren't what they are today. It was 5 years before jQuery's initial release . . . people needed to learn the proper terms somewhere in those days.

I can assure that there were good and bad pages then, the same as there are good and awful pages today.

There are good pages today?

I don't think it's suggesting "Amaya website" is an incorrect or bad phrase in and of itself, I think it's just using the different passages to show how they'd prefer you style links in hypertext.

These days I don't think you'd find many people following this style guide, but I think I understand what they're going for. They seem to be making the prose neutral to the technical details; after all, if you're keyboard navigating, maybe you're not "clicking" per-se. Maybe the pages are printed onto paper, etc.

I do agree "Click Here" is bad because you need to read the context to know what "Here" is, and for the accessibility reason my GP mentioned.

Hmmm. My first thought was they were avoiding the word "website" in this case so that it would make more sense if you were viewing it on paper or outside of a hypertext environment. But actually, that would make "Get Amaya!" and other such phrases equally awkward. Without the hyperlinks, they become a bit strange. So I guess that was probably not their reasoning.

Now I really wish the page elaborated a bit more. I do wonder if there's any logic to avoiding "website" or if it's just the different choices they made in the examples.

We don't dial phone numbers any more either, but the terminology remains.

I would suggest that "click here" is more concise, meaningful, and well understood than "follow this link" or alternatives.

I don't suggest "follow this link" either, or even anything that mentions a link. Obviously it's an extreme example involving traditional prose, but think for example of a Wikipedia article: the links in Wikipedia articles are natural and obvious. Links in navigation panels and navbars also follow this pattern generally speaking: like at the bottom of Hacker News itself, "Guidlines" "FAQ" "List" ...

In cases where you want to do something involving a call to action, like "Click here to download", I think "Download" or "Download now!" are better. And hell, often times CTAs are better as buttons (at least visually) than links anyways.

That said, it's not like I follow this religiously. But anyway, I think it's highly likely people are taking away the wrong message here.

I guess to put it another way, it's not that the terminology we use is dated or wrong per-se; I mean sure, people tap on hyperlinks more than they click on them these days probably, but the point isn't that the terminology is dated or isn't understood. It's that well-structured hypertext can avoid it altogether.

I see your point, but I'm less anti the use of "click".

Firstly because of the acceptance of "click is to web as dial is to phone", that the term "click" as a verb meaning to follow a navigation link or interact with a button, or generally interact at all with something on a website or app. I think this is useful and should be encouraged [0].

Secondly because it was used in the first place because it was very clear instruction. "Download" by itself assumes that the user knows how to download, and if the UI element isn't clear that it's a link or a button (or interactive) then that's not obvious how that should happen. "Click here to download" is much more clear, obvious, and helpful. I think it was old-school SourceForge that had "Download" buttons that didn't look like buttons, and ran adverts that had very prominent "Click here to download" buttons, and that ended up being very confusing and getting a lot of people to click on shitty ads.

Thirdly, and purely as a matter of personal taste, I don't subscribe to the design philosophy that less is better. I prefer clear instructions to ambiguous ones, even if that means more words. The impulse to surround everything in whitespace, remove scroll bars, and make it look pretty at the cost of usability should be discouraged imho. A button should look like a button. It should be clearly labelled with what it does, or what you need to do to make it do the thing. I realise I'm in a minority here, but that's not unusual.

[0] though maybe the new verbal usage of "I'm double-clicking on this concept" to mean supporting it is probably a bit much.

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