[whatwg] Menus, fallback, and backwards compatibility: ideas wanted

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 1 Jan 2006, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
>
> I once noticed that my wife, who is a university student and volunteers 
> to maintain a simple informational web site for other students in her 
> group, makes external links from the site like this:
> 
> <a href="http://example.com/some-page">http://example.com/some-page</a>
> 
> I asked: "Why are you doing this? Why don't you put something meaningful 
> inside <a> instead of repeating the URL?" And she said: "If they can see 
> the URL in the page body, they can memorize it or write it down [on 
> paper] in case they need to visit that page once more. I've seen people 
> follow a hyperlink, find that the linked resource is interesting, and 
> then each time they want to return to that resource, they would type the 
> URL of the site that has the link (if it luckily remains there) and 
> follow the link." I was shocked. This means that people don't know about 
> bookmarks or find them too hard to use.

That is indeed a worrying anecdote, but it is probably one that Web 
browser vendors need to worry about more than us. (Though if anyone has 
any ideas of ways we can extend HTML to help with this, please don't 
hesitate to come forward with them.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'