Fandom Snowflake 2021 #2: The Salon

[silveradept]

Day Three of Janus's month provides the second challenge: to make a connection with someone new.

In your own space (or their own space) interact with someone new.

That's halt slightly harder than usual this year, as many of the people that are running this iteration are people who have done it before or done other ones before or been participants in previous or other challenges like this one. There are also some newer faces and names, so I don't think it will be an issue to find new people to interact with.

For something like this, I thought I might borrow an idea from jenett and hold a salon for people to talk in and meet new people and have interesting conversations with them. I'll be borrowing her house rules and useful notes sections as well, if with a modification or two.

Here's a starter question that's on my mind. If you want to talk about something else, feel free.

As a Great Old One when it comes to the World Wide Web, it's been ingrained in me that part of making the Web accessible is providing descriptive text for your links to other parts of the Web. There's no technical wrongness involved in a link that only says "click here" or just "here", but usually, there's a perfectly serviceable description of what is on the other end of the link right there in the same sentence that says "Click here." Expanding the tag to include time description seems like something that could be easily done. Nowadays, I would expect something like that to fall under "good SEO" rather than accessibility, but I'm also a little shirty about the idea that we've optimized the Web for robots and in doing so have made it much more frustrating for humans and their assistive technologies.

Am I just "old man shouts at cloud" about this, or is there progress I haven't seen, or some other thing that I should be posting attention to about this? It seems small and petty, but it also seems fixable with a small and petty amount of work.

Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help about tracking a post is in the Dreamwidth FAQs, as is an entire category of FAQs about notifications in general.

Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!

Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.

House rules:

1. This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.


2. Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to. Keeping conversations SFW is a good idea if you don't want the reputation of being horny on main, and see above about reserved rights to redirect and moderate. Follow Wheaton's Law.


3. If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)


4. If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I very much prefer things when the link itself contains enough information that it can be plunked and auto-linked and there's a reasonable description of what the link is about. One of the things I don't like about the internet is retyping things.

One of the modern things that I haven't peered under the hood of adequately is the mechanism that drives the link previews as seen on the Facebook and Twitter. I know it's got to be some sort of metadata, and I would very much like two things:

a) for Dreamwidth to include it in modern styles

b) for the Rich Text Editor to be aware of them and have the ability to select which ones you'd like to include.

[silveradept]

I'm not fully aware of what you mean by the link previews, because what comes to mind is the "hover over the link, see some fragment of a graphic of the web page, have to click through anyway to get anything useful."

[azurelunatic]

They're a small card-like HTML block, showing the title of the destination page, an image from the page, and a text snippet. They would be possible to construct by hand, but places like Twitter and Facebook which don't allow HTML-ing build them for you.

[silveradept]

That would be helpful, yes, assuming that the destination were clear, rather than obscured through marketing materials.

[ghoti]

I know that my struggle is with how to consolidate my default "click here" to a word or two to link, instead of a whole sentence.

[silveradept]

Why do you feel the need to consolidate? Especially if we're all browsing the web on small screens with adequate touch sensing, or seems like giving a bigger target to hit would be a good thing.

[alexseanchai]

I'd rather the link be part of the sentence than the full sentence too. Easier to read.

[ghoti]

The instances I'm thinking about in particular are in my role as website wrangler for a religious community I am a part of. Many of our participants are neither tech-savvy nor necessarily using touch-screen devices.

My links are frequently "Click this link to see a map of the college campus we will be renting space from"; parking is available in Lots 3 and T. If you need a space closer than that, please contact mailto:person_who_deals_with_campus_parking@organization.org.

Or "Lunch will be pot-luck with [Dietary Restriction], please clearly mark allergens (link to common allergens) present."

Or "Click here for the schedule of services for the next month."

In the third example, I would linkify "schedule of services".
In the second example, I would probably linkify "allergens" but also acknowledge that no one is going to follow it.
The first example is where I struggle most. Do I link "college campus"? "Map"? The whole sentence?

I try to balance any accessibility needs vs. the intended (assumed) user of the site I am linking -from-. A "click here" is probably most convenient for most of the people needing the link, but.

[silveradept]

I feel like many of those examples could be full links all across the sentences, and it would make them more descriptive as links.

For that first example, I would linkify "Click this link to see a map of the college campus we will be renting space from" all the way through.

[alexseanchai]

there is technical wrongness inherent in the tumblr tendency to cite sources with a link of the following format:

[x]

we are clicking these on touchscreens, people, and that link is tiny


I also contend that there is technical wrongness inherent in links of the following format:

https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fseries%2F1559746&t=YzY2MjM1YjJlZWVmMTU1YjdiNzUxZjY5NzZkNDMyZWY0YjZiYTJkYSxBamJYekhRcQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AlGahBfq8Wo-ZIY461wmufA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fmlwritersguild.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F639335801611763712%2Fmiraculous-writers-guild-january-event-2021-for&m=1&ts=1609718478

less in some ways than there is in links of the following format:

http://email.kingarthurbaking.com/q/G1NYGmTCANu0Xj8sNuCSWQjxIEvsNVIX1KjZcOJYWxleGNvbmFsbEBnbWFpbC5jb23DiAwztmawhfe4fLhpI9ea-aEO8szYg

and both of those are less wrong than links of the following format:

https://click.everyaction.com/k/23276107/267093959/198860472?ms=digital-fund-email-ea-x-appeal_20201231_yearend-f_card_6_engaged_and_interested-EAST&utm_source=ea&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=appeal_20201231_yearend-f_card_6&utm_content=engaged_and_interested-EAST&emci=9c3e6cd5-c84a-eb11-a607-00155d43c992&emdi=b4f1e078-d54b-eb11-a607-00155d43c992&ceid=4319908&contactdata=qd8kZtS98MIzMu0fXP5HWdOZkZ1ctzwTc0Nz0IPInkjD5wgaqMRyuOQlMBcuNWt%2FXaY8XbZNGXdLFfi77zAhxw%3D%3D&nvep=ew0KICAiVGVuYW50VXJpIjogIm5ncHZhbjovL3Zhbi9UU00vVFNNQVUvMS81NjQ5MCIsDQogICJEaXN0cmlidXRpb25VbmlxdWVJZCI6ICJiNGYxZTA3OC1kNTRiLWViMTEtYTYwNy0wMDE1NWQ0M2M5OTIiLA0KICAiRW1haWxBZGRyZXNzIjogImFsZXhjb25hbGxAZ21haWwuY29tIg0KfQ%3D%3D&hmac=XP4Acy_iRxaHenoIlDL7PVdWnzjtktwjEwqKo5414-0=

bc like, the Tumblr link is redirecting me through a bunch of nonsense, but if I know enough about how URLs work, I can pry the destination URL out of that. the King Arthur link I cannot, and it's using HTTP instead of HTTPS for no good reason (HTTPS is at least available for my browser to insist upon, which is not universally the case for these redirects between the HTTPS email provider website and the HTTPS destination website), but it does truthfully tell me the destination website.

the third link? if I hadn't taken it from a National Audubon Society fundraising letter, I would have no idea the destination was Audubon.org! so like, this is an example of a reputable organization actively making it more difficult for people to identify phishing emails, just to begin with.

[silveradept]

When I said technical wrong, I only meant that the HTML parser won't give you grief about an inaccessible tag so long as it's formed correctly. The things you're pointing out here do have significant wing to them, but they're all valid links and URLs on the technical aspect.

I strongly agree with you, though, that those links are inaccessible and do lots of bad things to the idea of helping navigate the web safely, and it's all because analytics and advertising have become the primary means of finding the World Wide Web. Which requires you to visit or pass through one site so that your click can be recorded and your destination and source stored so the advertisers knew they should advertise on Facebook more and try to convince AO3 that they should really accept ads because they have an entire fandom on Tumblr that could be monetized for all the fic they're reading. I think those kinds of URLs should be banished from the web, frankly.

[alexseanchai]

ah yeah, relevant difference

and while I can strip the fbclid gibberish or whatever from a link someone else gives me if I can copy the URL? if I'm in any of a list of mobile apps, I don't have that ability.

[silveradept]

And that's why they want you to use their apps rather than the websites, because that advertising and tracking data is what they really want from you. Rather than pushing people into apps (which may very well be just skins of the website) and giving them no way of opting out, they're should first be a functioning website, and then offer the app with additional functionality or other features that would make it worth the tradeoff.