The title attribute.

How long is too long?

[Reflection]

By now everyone is using the title attribute on their <a>'s right? ;)

So now that you are, have you determined how long is too long?

As an easy example, a link to your forum pages...

<a href="forums.html" title="forums">forums</a>

Is obviously too short and doesnt really offer much information to the user.

<a href="forums.html" title="Discuss web development issues with other webmasters">forums</a>

Would you consider this too much information/going overboard?
Would "Web development discussion" be more appropriate?

Thoughts?

[tedster]

One basic guide would be this -- the W3C recommendation is for browsers to display the title attribute as a tool-tip. So any value that would not be practical as a tool-tip display (too long to read in the time that it stays visible) would not be a good idea in a title attribute.

Three words such as "web development discussion" falls well within that practical limit, I'd say.

[pageoneresults]

I would have replied just as tedster did. That tool tip only appears for a short period.

Also, here is some additional information from Jakob Nielsen's site...

Using Link Titles to Help Users Predict Where They Are Going [useit.com]

Link titles should be less than 80 characters, and should only rarely go above 60 characters. Shorter link titles are better.

You pretty much treat it like alt text. Lately I've been on a mission to remove some of the title attributes I have in place. If the link text itself is descriptive of the resource, there is no need for the title attribute. If the link text is not descriptive, then a title attribute will benefit the user.

Various testing shows that the title attribute is not taken into consideration when assigning relevancy to a page, it appears to be ignored.

[g1smd]

The attribute is not indexed by Google yet, but sure helps accessibility. And, it might be taken into consideration in the future. I would include it now, but would not use more than about 6 to 8 words in it.