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List of recommended links: links are very long and aren't descriptive
There are a couple of issues with how links are listed here, which go against accessibility and content standards.
- Generally we avoid hyperlinking entire sentences or bullet points - there are cases where a bullet list of links (for example 'further reading' in a piece of guidance) but these tend to have shorter links and be descriptive links
- Descriptive links are ones that make it clear to users where they're going and what the content is about - a lot of these links have kind of vague, 'editorial' or clickbait-y titles like "OAuth, “It’s complicated.”"
Technically speaking, these probably aren't easy to fix because it looks like the links are pulled in from somewhere else and possibly automated, so it might be hard to address these issues without manually editing them all. Also they'd each need to be considered individually (there's not one rule we could apply to all of them to make them more descriptive, for example).
Philosophically speaking, this is a bit of a challenge because we don't really link to this type of content (non public sector) from government websites/products, unless there's a very good reason, so our content standards aren't really set up to be applied to something like this.
Ultimately it's likely this list won't stay on the API Catalogue and will be moved to something more dedicated to the community, so for now, probably nothing to do, but just raising this for posterity and further discussion, probably in the near future.
For context, the links are the title of the blog post, and I've purposefully not rewritten them so they match the title that's shared - if that's a bit clickbait-y, then at least it's consistent with what we are linking out to.
Main intent of the page was to have a place that all the reading could be retrieved, rather than it being a long list of links, and using the title of the page/post was easiest, and without doing a load of extra work, gives us what we needed
Yeah, that makes sense, however it's not to GOV.UK style, which would look more like:
- API Handyman blog post about required query parameters
We can leave it for now as we need to determine the best place and format for this anyway, so we can do all that work together.