Re: [Dragora-users] Some issues with the Dragora website

[Michael Siegel]

Am 15.11.19 um 00:42 schrieb Matias Fonzo:
> El 2019-11-14 10:08, Michael Siegel escribió:
>> IMHO, this would merely make things more confusing. I think Chris
>> has already solved this nicely by adding that little arrow symbol
>> to external links.
> 
> If my interpretation is correct, Chris added the symbol to avoid
> using underlining.  As I understand it, there are no impositions.
> But I understand that there's got to be something else to help
> potential users who are visually impaired.  Still, with all of this,
> it doesn't completely resolve the whole issue, as it would delve into
> the issue of accessibility (of course, worse is nothing).

I've re-checked this. The arrow is added only for external links, which
is, I think, the way it should be if you want to make those links
distinguishable from internal ones. That's also how Wikipedia does it
(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#External_links).

Underlining is a different question. And I would really advice against
underlining external links and then not underlining internal ones. That
would definitely qualify as bad practice because it's unnecessarily
confusing. I mean, a link  – I mean a standard link in normal text – is
a link. Therefore, all such links should share a uniform style. If you
want to add an arrow for external links, okay, fine, do that. I tend to
think it's not necessary, Wikipedia being an exception because given the
sheer amount of links in many Wikipedia articles, being able to tell
whether something is an external link right away really does enhance
usability. The vast majority of links in Wikipedia articles are,
however, not external ones. If it were that way, you'd have text
paragraphs full of little arrows, which would be quite annoying to read.
(I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia's style guide demanded that
excessive linking to external resources within the main text of an
article should be avoided.)

By the way, I've just discovered that the Donate page makes use of bold
formatting in two places where the bolded text is not a link.

So, here's a suggestion: If you really can't stand underlined links,
simply don't underline them, but also don't make them bold. Just give
non-visited and visited links reasonable colors and have :hover
underlined (without changing anything else). After trying a few things,
I'd say that just keeping the standard colors (blue/purple) as they are
provides the best usability here and also looks fairly good, actually.
Finally, I think the arrow attached to external links should be of the
same color as non-visited links (cf. Wikipedia, for example).

>> However, in the current version, http://rsync.dragora.org/ISO/ will
>> also be interpreted as an external link. I'm not sure it should be
>> that way.
> 
> Indeed, the rsync server is hosted externally.

I see.


Best
--msi