June 13, 2000: Zeldman recently sang the praises of the hover pseudo-class and the title attribute. In fact, he (good-naturedly) chastised cam for not using hover. I'd just like to point out that adding a title attribute is great (especially if it adds some good contextual information.. I remember someone calling it 'microcontent'), but in terms of usability I don't think it's a substitute for descriptive link text in the first place. I also like hover--it's an elegant (i.e. easy) way to accomplish mouseovers--but, again, it's no substitute for making your links obvious before the mouseover. I guess my point is just that both of these are good additions to link usability, but they can't make up for opaque link text and less-than-obvious visual link treatments.

The other thing I want to say is that I absolutely agree with him about how much of a shame it is that Microsoft's business practices have obscured and obstructed its often superior browser design (and implementation). If only we could use Microsoftisms like XMLHttp and data binding...