In the example "Get Amaya!" that they give:

Now that I paste it in this HN comment, the link is gone. If it had said "To get Amaya, click here!" at least you could have seen from the context that it used to be a link.

There's also no explanation in it for why making a verb a link would be bad while nouns are ok.

It's 2025. HTML is, first and foremost, a GUI toolkit. People have forgotten how hypertext works.

You want to see what good hypertext looks like? Check out: https://www.zetatalk.com

This lady has been promulgating her own brand of UFO kookery since the 90s, always in this same beautiful format. Nicely flowing prose, with only the relevant words turned into a link to delve further into the topic. Wikimedia also has very good practices.

But whenever I get depressed about the state of webshit, I glance back at ZetaTalk, a product of a different era, when hypertext was exciting, "surfing the web" to explore topics was a fun pastime, and anyone could put virtually anything they wanted online.

The verb seems pretty important to me…

————- Learn more about [the browser]

Never hear about [the browser] again

Those links will do very different things.

Linking manual for Wikipedia pages: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Li...

_Tell me more about Amaya_

is preferable to any shorter link.

If, somehow, you have multiple links in a sentence, see if you can manage a word or two of unlinked text in between, or, better yet, stop being pretentious and focus on usefulness.

Not: _You can run web browsers,_ _spreadsheets_ or _drawing software._

You can run:

* _web browsers_

* _spreadsheets_

* _drawing software_

This is a well researched areas with subject experts, our opinion is large irrelevant.

This advice distinguishes between the form (a link or button) and the content. I think it makes sense because you had other ways of knowing that it's a link than the content (underline, blue text, button border).

I guess this was written at a time when CSS was used relatively conservatively and, whatever the label of the button or link, it was clear you could click on it.

Somehow the current UX trend is to remove those underlines and boxes. I'm not sure how people are meant to intuit that something is clickable _except_ for the label.

I remember that I often got confused in the early days of Wikipedia because the way they use link text was different from what was common on the web back in the day.

Back in the days when Google was still driven largely by Pagerank, I remember googling the phrase "click here" for shits and giggles. The top links were for Flash player, Silverlight, and Java. Meaning that these were the most common links for the text "click here" - i.e. "Need Flash? Click here." Relic of a dark age where nothing was accessible and the performance didn't matter.

Another benefit of using text other than "click here" is that it's helpful for web crawlers too. Google, Bing, and other crawlers use link context (e.g. "lawn care in new jersey" vs "click here") to establish authority/relevance for the site being linked to. The closer the context of the link, the more authority a website (generally) gets for that topic.