[xnx]

Amazingly, this has been the recommendation for at least the last 27(!) years: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/be-succinct-writing-for-the...

People who headed that advice benefited from better human usability and improved "SEO" performance due to keyword relevance.

Web tools should have warnings about "click here" text in the same way they do syntax errors.

[neilv]

Around 1994, I'm pretty sure I saw ordinary simple "how to make a Web page" tutorials that told you specifically not do "here" or "click here" links.

You were to instead make the link around relevant text.

(Also, early people often got hypertext just fine. The problem was print designers, who kept wanting to make the Web be glossy brochures. At first, they'd try things like making the whole page a GIF/JPEG, and would get laughed at, but they soon took over what a Web browser is, for the entire field. Over the decades, they'd then slowly rediscover ideas that were there from the beginning, and give them names like "responsive design" and "accessibility", and write books about them. On Monday, I had to battle with a Web site framework, to force something exotic called "server-side rendering", and also to make an `<a href=URL>` element be a hypertext link that the Web browser loads as a Web page when the user chooses to follow the link.)

[xnx]

Amen. Graphic designers with a background in anything print have been a huge hindrance to the web. After a long time in the wilderness of single-page apps and framework, I see at least some small cracks of light where people are recognizing how simple/useful pages (e.g. McMaster-Carr) can be the most "beautiful".

[grbrr]

Jakob Nielsen’s advice is, to put it politely, not “the recommendation” but rather “someone’s recommendation.”

[JimDabell]

It wasn’t just Nielsen saying this. Pretty much anybody who knew anything about usability or accessibility was telling people not to use “click here” for links since the 90s, and once Google arrived with PageRank, SEO people started saying the same thing. This has been best practice for at least a quarter century for multiple reasons.