yes, that is what I meant on

netsperience — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:03:02 +0000

yes, that is what I meant

on that subject.. users being confused...I go nuts when I see a mailto: href email link

On about 85% of peoples' computers (isn't that about the Windows % ?) it will pop open Outlook which they probably never set up and then they are staring at it - and if they try to set it up they will just get frustrated, unless they figure out they can use their cable/fios isp email, but really, we all know who we're dealing with here, right?

Meanwhile, they forget why they wanted to contact you: You just lost a client/sale/headache whatever-

so I advise/use contact forms whenever possible - it's so easy to set up the php mail() function... or some kind of SMTP cgi

besides, putting your email address in text on the page is going to get you a lot of spam (yeh I know about ways of concealing - but if you're doing that, why not put in a contact form?)

netsperience wrote: (I

Megan — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:01:37 +0000

netsperience wrote:

(I assume that is main reason we are dealing with self-links to avoid an unnecessary reload)

Oh, I didn't even explain that, did I? Maybe I'll edit the article to fix that.

It's really a problem with people being confused when they click on a link and it takes them to the same page they're on.

My preference: Replace the

webwiz — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:25:32 +0000

My preference: Replace the link tag with <strong> -- this even works with CSS off. (Netscape 4 users get unstyled pages from me. And, yes, Emily, the local school district still uses NS4... even tho' it's near Silicon Valley.)

Nice summary of the pros and cons of other techniques though. Thank you.

3 more ideas Drupal has

netsperience — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:52:39 +0000

3 more ideas

Drupal has the ext module that adds a class to all external links and option to display an icon on them. Something similar could be done for self-links, an icon (don't know why)
If you write the menu dynamically from an inc file or whatever, you could set the href of the self-link to "javascript:void(0)" which would not reload the page if clicked (I assume that is main reason we are dealing with self-links to avoid an unnecessary reload)
similar to previous post but instead of changing the entire link you could merely write the text portion without the anchor...

These could all be accomplished with a combo of JS and CSS

Interesting article Megan. I

netsperience — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:31:08 +0000

Interesting article Megan.

I am an old hand at JavaScript and I usually use it first, sometimes even in php pages, passing values back and forth.

I like the idea of the cursor:pointer rule to make the link less apparent.

While it could be tough to distinguish the home page

For example, if the link points to http://yoursite.com/ but the page is referenced from http://yoursite.com/index.html.

you could use js to search for a specific fragment of the url (I used to do this on GeoCities after they started adding ad code numbers to the urls)

Another possibility, as long as we are in the land of JS and DHTML, is to locate the link to the current page and rewrite it to a link to some other page, either a static rule or dynamic rule with an array of links...

I used to pick out unusual pages on my site and link to them instead of the current page so anyone inattentive enough to click on the link would get a "surprise" - but that would not do for a "serious" site.