[piqufoh]

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]

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

[roryirvine]

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]

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]

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!"

[xnx]

> 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.

[px43]

He was 14 when he wrote that.

[reddalo]

We lost him too soon.