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Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

This was the web between 1995 and 2002:

To see our latest news, click here, or click here if you want to request a catalog. The latest board minutes can be found by clicking here. Click here for product documentation. If you have any comments about our web site, click here to email us, or click here to call. If you were confused by this click here, or click here to let us know it met your expectations. Click here to see how many people have visited our internet web site.

On the plus side, there was actual useful content on the web, rather than the content-free designs that popped up in the Web 2.0 era.

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Something to keep in mind is that a modern web page would be virtually unusable by the standards of 2002 and a 1995 web page would have been virtually unusable without the "click here" links. Conventions have to be established. While those blue underlined links may have had some precedent among some computer users (e.g. many help systems of the era used colored text to highlight hyperlinks), they would have little meaning to someone who bought their first computer to get on that newfangled Internet thingy. So while I agree that they were a bad thing over all, they were a necessary stopgap.

It takes less than five minutes for a person to learn how to click on links. They're a different color and underlined. It's obvious they are special. Despite "UX" being a discipline that actually exists, we've actually gone backwards on usability in that nobody can figure out what's clickable these days. For example... all those greyed-out pipe-delimitted links at the top of this comment. Despite its ubiquity for about 15 years now, at least once a month I have to teach someone that the ubiquitous three line "hamburger" menu is clickable.

Someone tell Wikipedia please, they have a weird sort of moving/hidden hamburger that floats which I've not seen anywhere else, I wonder if there's public stats on activity following the layout update.

Whereas if you removed the "click here" tags and associated text, you'd be left with:

> See our latest news, request a catalog. The latest board minutes. Product documentation. If you have any comments about our web site, email us, or call. If you were confused by this, let us know it met your expectations. See how many people have visited our internet web site.

Which imho is not any better, and arguably worse.

It's okay, though, you would most certainly have the main navigation menu repeated several times on the page. The new web master is learning this thing called Balinese Caligraphy or JavaScript or something along those lines and have even added a new drop down menu in two spots so it will be even easier to find the link to the page with the contact page and info on how to send us a fax to get a catalog mailed to them.

Click on of the following links:

See our latest news

request a catalog

Read the latest board minutes

Product documentation

email us with questions about our website

Call us

So a little indicator that these are links without "click here" and now the link text is very informative. But this would look like a menu.

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