---
title: Please don't mess with links
link: https://maurycyz.com/misc/real_links/
source: lobste-rs
published: 2026-10-23T00:37:10Z
updated: 2026-10-23T00:37:10Z
first_seen: 2026-10-23T18:40:08.262074691Z
authors:
- maurycyz.com via gavinmorrow
labels:
- web
summary: Comments
content: extracted
html: 2026-10-23-please-don-t-mess-with-links.html
---

**2026-05-31**

A link is just a button that takes you somewhere when you click it right?

```
<style>
span {
  text-decoration: underline;
  color: #44EEEE;
}
</style>
<span onclick="window.location='https://xkcd.com/'">100% legit link</span>
```

100% legit link

Except that's a pale, shallow imitation of a link. A real link can be:

- Opened in a new tab. (ctrl)
- ... or a fresh window. (shift)
- ... or saved as a file (alt).
- Copied as a URL (right click)
- Used with the keyboard (tab + enter)
- Seen by tools like search engines and screen readers.
- Hovered over to see the URL.

... none of which work with a button.

*Another common offense* is to use a real link, but hook the click event to open a popup. However, with a real \<a target="\_blank"> link, I can:

- See the loading progress...
- ... or/and cancel it.
- ... see descriptive error pages and retry if needed.
- Open multiple at once.
- Read the original page while it loads.
- Use my browser's tabs or/and window manager to organize them.
- Bookmark the page.
- Copy the URL and send it to a friend.

... and above all, they are consistent:

I've long lost count of how many times I've accidentally closed the whole site while trying to close a popup that was a little too convincing.

It's also extremely common to click a link with a slow connection, only to be greeted with perpetual spinner. I have no idea if anything is actually happening or how long it will take. Worse, it usually covers up the original page so I can't even read that!

*Browsers are good at links and loading pages: It's the whole point.*

- Don't use javascript buttons as links.
- Don't build your own loading animations.
- Link previews should open and close on hover, not on click.
- Don't open links in javascript popups: Use target="\_blank" instead.

## *Other common problems*:

Infinite scrolling breaks ctrl-f, bookmarks, the home/end keys and often the back button.

You can have a 100k of text on a page: Browsers will render partially downloaded HTML and the user won't even notice. Using a 5 MB javascript framework just do a worse job of downloading text is dumb.

To optimize speed, it's best to minimize the total number of round trips. Just putting everything in a single TCP connection will always be better than breaking it up because of TCP's slow start algorithm.

*Don't reimplement \<details>* which will break search tools and screen readers.

... but using fancy CSS to make it look nice is fine.

*Don't roll your own date picker* (or any other built-in form inputs)

This will always used the user's preferred date format, covert it to the standard yyyy-mm-dd, and works with the keyboard... also, it's one line of code that works with dark mode by default.

## *Related*:

Real links!

- [https://susam.net/do-not-roll-your-own.html](https://susam.net/do-not-roll-your-own.html): Don't Roll Your Own ...
- [/misc/13kb/](https://maurycyz.com/misc/13kb/): Why using a single big page can actually improve performance.