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Anchor text

Choosing the right anchor text (highlighted in blue in Mosaic and Netscape) is an interesting design challenge. For some reasons that I don't really accept, "Click here" is considered very poor taste. (Even worse: Press the blue text.)

One classic approach is to highlight 'glossary terms'. The expectation will be that if you don't know the term, clicking on it will give a definition. But on the WWWeb, with significant time-delays, the odds of someone caring enough to wait for a definition that probably would have fit on the same page... those odds are not so great. This memetics page would be an interesting test case, if its accesses are logged...?

If you're really trying to get people to read your prose, highlighted words can be very distracting. Henry Churchyard is aware of this tradeoff in his prodigious annotated Jane Austen.

An extreme solution (that may turn out to be the one of choice, finally) is to embed the links in the style of footnotes, as Edward Ayers did here.

Another problem is side-by-side anchors that appear to be a single one. My demo paragraph from Finnegans Wake, in the first draft, presented a solid paragraph of clickable blue text, which was so off-putting I've chosen instead to break it up into one phrase on each line.

(Why does HTML insist that #-anchors have included text? Why, that is, can't I just write <a name="jumphere"></a> without any text between the open and close? Why, in fact, do we have to close off this sort of anchor at all???)

Menus and maps

I'm no fan of clickable imagemaps. (Neither is Markus Freericks (Germany).) I love clickable ascii graphics, though, like this genealogical tree of Greek myth or this US map

(A warning: be very careful to globally replace the following special characters before adding any tags (even PRE) to a document with ascii art:

    & -->  &amp;  [DO THIS FIRST BEFORE YOU ADD MORE &'s!!!]
    > -->  &gt;
    < -->  &lt;
These characters are usually pretty uncommon, so you may not have gotten in the habit of fixing them first... but with ascii art (or with >-quoted email!) you need to cultivate that habit!)

If you look at the ascii art that's available from Bob Allison or on the newsgroups {rec.arts.ascii} or {alt.ascii-art}, you might think of lots of clever uses for clickable ascii-art: maps, organizational charts, a mockup of an HTML document with clickable tags (THAT 'll confuse 'em! :^), or an outline of a human body with visible, clickable inner organs...

With a little ingenuity, ascii graphics can be used as the ALT text substituted for images by lynx et al. Like here, for one excellent example.

Here's a little experiment in HTML-art (looks best in Netscape-- three colors, wider display)... and <another> that uses BLINK and CENTER. (Anybody else experimenting with GIF89 animation?

And here's an ancient FAQ about making ascii art.

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