All Who Are Tired of "Here, Here, and Here" Say "Hear, Hear!"

One of my net peeves is a disturbing tend in the blogosphere to group hyperlinks together with nothing more than a "here" descriptor for each link. Doc is a key culprit, but by no means the only one. Other examples can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The best recent example (as recently as today, in fact), comes from Allan Karl's blog entry here which reads, in part, as follows:

We started here, Then went here, here, here, here and here. Then here and here. Even here. But it was here that I had the most fun while basking in aura of pain relief meds sorely needed after a zealot Doctor had his way with remnants of my prehistoric past -- my wisdom teeth.

Is there a workable alternative to a list of "here" links? Do people think there is a need for a change to something better, some different convention, or are people perfectly satisfied with the way things are? I wonder. Certainly one positive thing that can be said for long lists of links identified only by heres is that it takes up very little space. Less is more, etc. But isn't there value in self-documenting links? Links that reveal something about what you're about to see before you click on it? An argument could be made that all you have to do is mouse over a "here" link to find out more about its contents. That assumes your browser has a facility to show you what the link is --- not all browsers (for example, Safari on MacOS X) do so.

I don't have an answer. I just have the question. Posted by brian at July 1, 2003 10:23 AM