Title tag for links?

[Peter Jenkins]

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc
Regards
Peter J

[Karl Groves]

"Peter Jenkins" <pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed>
wrote in message news:Er******************@news.xtra.co.nz...

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc

AFAIK, the major screen readers do not support this attribute.

-Karl

[David Dorward]

Peter Jenkins wrote:

How necessary are these?

Are what? Its traditional to construct newsgroup posts in such a way that
the subject is a summary and not required reading.

There is no such thing as a title tag for links, you are probably thinking
of the title attribute. How necessary they are depends on the ability of
the link text to describe the document being linked to. Said text should
provide the user with everything they need in order to decide if they
should visit the link or not. A title attribute can be used to provide
additional, advisory information which might be useful to the user - it
certainly shouldn't be required reading.

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Stan Brown]

"Peter Jenkins" <some bogus address> wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc

Do you mean the title _attribute_ in an <a href>? Not necessary, but
occasionally helpful. Some browsers will display the title attribute
as a "tool tip". On the other hand, the link text should give
adequate information to let a user know whether they'll find what's
at the other end to be of interest.

Don't put anything in the title attribute that users _must_ see,
because many of them won't see it.

And since it says "title", you don't want to put in obvious non-
title information either.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Andrew Glasgow]

In article <Er******************@news.xtra.co.nz>,
"Peter Jenkins"
<pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed> wrote:

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc
Regards
Peter J

They are not particularly necessary. I usually put them in with the
title of the linked page or a *very* brief summary.

--
| Andrew Glasgow <amg39(at)cornell.edu> |
| "SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it |
| is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then." |
| -- John Woods |

[Neal]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 22:35:25 +1200, Peter Jenkins
<pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed> wrote:

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc
Regards
Peter J

As has been mentioned, the title tag marks a head element which titles the
whole page. You intended title attribute, clearly.

They are optional. They can provide a bit of extra information for those
whose UAs support their display. Lynx doesn't render them as far as I've
seen, so no need for using SEO keywords there, and not useful for
need-to-know content.

[Markus Ernst]

"Peter Jenkins" <pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed>
schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:Er******************@news.xtra.co.nz...

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc

In addition to all the other posts I give you an example where I use the
title attribute for a link:

In an administration interface I have a list of - lets say - people who
attend a workshop. The list is a table with columns such as name, address,
zip, city. It can be sorted by some columns; the header of these columns is
a link which can be clicked to sort. It looks like <a
href="thispage.php?sort=city" title="Click here to sort by cities">city</a>.

So the information given in the title attribute is not essential as the
experienced user knows it already, but for the non-experienced one who
thinks that probably that link will be for sorting it gives him/her the
confirmation without the need to try it out.

--
Markus

[Peter Jenkins]

"Neal" <ne*****@yahoo.com> wrote in message

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 22:35:25 +1200, Peter Jenkins
<pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed> wrote:

How necessary are these?
Just hoping to get some views on this - particularly from vision impaired
users, those who use text browsers etc
Regards
Peter J

As has been mentioned, the title tag marks a head element which titles the
whole page. You intended title attribute, clearly.

Yes, I did intend title attribute. I was tired and a bit worse for wear :-)

Thank you Neal and everybody else for all your very helpful responses -
just what I needed.
Regards
Peter J


They are optional. They can provide a bit of extra information for those
whose UAs support their display. Lynx doesn't render them as far as I've
seen, so no need for using SEO keywords there, and not useful for
need-to-know content.

[Andy Dingley]

"Peter Jenkins" <pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed> wrote in message news:<Er******************@news.xtra.co.nz>...

How necessary are these?

[Title attributes on <a> links]

Who cares ? They're useful, they're never damaging, and the cost of
adding them is trivial. Just do it.

The most awkward part of adding them is managing the metadata to
actually know what text they should contain. This is obviously vital
and important that it's done well (Just look at the past mess with alt
attributes on <img>'s). If you've gone to this trouble to find a
useful text, then put it in by all means.

[PeterMcC]

Andy Dingley wrote in
<28**************************@posting.google.com >

"Peter Jenkins"
<pe**************************************@xtra.co. enzed> wrote in
message news:<Er******************@news.xtra.co.nz>...

How necessary are these?

[Title attributes on <a> links]

Who cares ? They're useful, they're never damaging, and the cost of
adding them is trivial. Just do it.

From an SEO perspective, it may be worth mentioning that the title attribute
adds to the non-indexed text in the file, thus reducing the keyword density
of the page. As with all text, if the title attribute text is not performing
a useful function, I'd advise leaving it out but, if it is purposeful, then
it ought to be there.

--
PeterMcC
If you feel that any of the above is incorrect,
inappropriate or offensive in any way,
please ignore it and accept my apologies.

[Nick Kew]

In article <28**************************@posting.google.com >,
di*****@codesmiths.com (Andy Dingley) writes:

The most awkward part of adding them is managing the metadata to
actually know what text they should contain.

For links there's an easy default: the title of the document linked.

--
Nick Kew