Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)

Posted by theandrewbailey 7/2/2025

Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)(www.w3.org)

520 points | 343 commentspage 7

mgdev 7/3/2025|

Local LLMs will solve this.

lucaspauker 7/2/2025||

This seems like dogma

2OEH8eoCRo0 7/2/2025||

Clickable hyperlinks are considered harmful IMO

DonHopkins 7/2/2025||

...Unless you are linking to a discussion about how you should not use "click here" as link text.

jrappswe 7/2/2025||

Dumbest shit ever, in the case of a download, it SHOULD mention the word “download” in the actual link

paulschreiber 7/3/2025||

People are _still_ doing this shit. Unsubscribe links. Official government site. Fucking terrible.

jcims 7/2/2025||

I remember this, it stuck in my head and I never did it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

neuroelectron 7/2/2025||

"2001"

piqufoh 7/2/2025|

From the bottom of the page;

> contributed Sep 2001 by Aaron Swartz

Thoughts

-- this advice is 24 years old (and I think largely ignored)

-- Aaron Swartz (!)

xnx 7/2/2025||

Jakob Nielsen's recommendation from 1996: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/accessible-design-for-users...

roryirvine 7/2/2025||

Yes, this was common web design advice in the mid 90s, though often people's first response was to simply replace "Click here to..." with "Follow this link to...", which was almost as bad.

Fixing those was a large part of my life whilst working for a web design agency during the school holidays circa 1996-97 (providing plenty of incentive to learn find/grep/sed/perl!)

I guess this 2001 W3C 'Tips for Webmasters' page was merely stating the commonly-accepted best practice at the time.

piqufoh 7/2/2025|||

Aaron's suggestion (which seems to have been lost?)

"Click here" assumes everyone has a computer and mouse. And it's not even needed: most users of the Web understand how to follow links.

netsharc 7/2/2025|||

Yes, most people understand how to navigate around the jankiness...

For example, most Windows programs have "File" as the first menu item. How do I exit? Go to File, the bottom option is usually "Exit". Does that make sense? No, why is "Exit" a File-related option? Why is it like that? Because it's always been like that.

Want to learn about the program? Go to Help > About.

Some more geniuses even got involved and thought "If the user wants to edit preferences, well, they can go to the menu option Edit, and find Preferences. Never mind that Edit is otherwise filled with document related functions like Cut, Copy, and Paste!"

AlienRobot 7/2/2025|||

Meanwhile, on GNOME, there is no standard menubar so good look figuring out which one of the icon-only buttons in the headerbar has the dropdown menu with the action that you want.

Edit -> preferences makes sense because you're editing your preferences. File -> Settings makes no sense. Help -> Options makes even less sense. Help -> KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS is just insane to me.

stavros 7/2/2025|||

I somehow think it would be more janky if the "exit" or the "preferences" items were in some random menu. I've never cared that "exit" doesn't seem to fit with "file" because it's always seemed more convenient for me that it's always in the same place.

netsharc 7/2/2025|||

Yes, it's janky but familiar. On the phone you'll see a "Click here" and know to use your thumb to touch the area of the screen to do whatever action is behind that, on the text-based browser you know you can tab to that "Click here" text and hit Enter to navigate. If a kid saw this you'd have to explain to them the historical context of desktop computers and mice.

Just because you're used to the jank doesn't mean it's the best design.

As sibling comment says, on the Mac the first menu item is about the app. App -> Preferences, App -> Exit, wouldn't such a convention make more sense?

ceejayoz 7/2/2025|||

I mean, on a Mac, there's always a menu for the current app as the first item, titled after the app. If I want to quit Slack, I open the Slack menu. Which makes a good amount of sense.

xnx 7/2/2025|||

> most users of the Web understand how to follow links.

Often very hard to tell what's a link when it's not underlined and non-blue colors (or no color) is used.

rezonant 7/2/2025|||

Which is also inaccessible (and goes against WCAG [1])

[1] https://webaim.org/blog/wcag-2-0-and-link-colors/

nemomarx 7/2/2025||||

you shouldn't make things a link without decorations tbh

when hn could use a more distinct style for it

jkestner 7/2/2025|||

And Nielsen had plenty to say about that too.

xnx 7/2/2025||

Indeed. Craigslist seems to be about the only site out there that hasn't fallen for every dumb design fad of the past 30 years.

px43 7/2/2025||

He was 14 when he wrote that.

reddalo 7/2/2025||

We lost him too soon.

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