In a Windows Store app, you can use links to navigate to pages in your app or in your app’s web context. You can also link to external pages outside of your app’s web context; these links launch the browser. This topic describes best practices for using links in Windows Store apps.
When to use a link
Only use links for navigation, such as opening an external URL or switching to another page in the same app. Don’t use links to perform actions other than navigating.
Dos and don'ts
| Do | Put a tooltip on every link. That way, if the link is occluded by the user's finger, the user can still see what it will do. |
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| When navigating to an external site, put the domain name inside the tooltip and style it with a secondary font color. Adding the domain name to the tooltip lets users know that they're about to navigate to an external site so they won't be surprised when they click the link. Because the tooltip from "title" attribute doesn’t support styling, use the Tooltip control instead. For Windows Store apps using JavaScript, use the win-text-domain CSS class (provided by the Windows Library for JavaScript style sheets) to style the domain portion of the URL. It's enough to just show the top-level domain. | |
| When the user doesn’t care whether he or she has visited a link, style the :visited state for that link so that the link looks the same regardless of whether the user has visited that page. The default style for a visited link makes it look different than a link that hasn't been visited. Sometimes the user doesn't care whether a link has been visited. This is usually the case for links that are a part of your app's main navigation. | |
| Don't | Don't make the link text too long. Keep the link text concise; if you want to provide additional information, put it inside the link's tooltip. |
Build date: 11/27/2012
