Link Embed is bad product development

  • I recently come to WP from another CMS and most things here are good. However… sometimes product developers get stuck in their own heads and create things in ways that don’t make sense.

    Pasting a link and having it automatically convert to an embed is one of those things. I’m sure the devs were super excited to implement this “feature”. The problem is that devs are not the ones who understand the actual use cases for the product they are developing. I see that people have been trying to explain for years to the devs that in real life, pasting a link should NOT automatically trigger the creation of an embed. It’s kinda ridiculous that anyone ever thought that when a user pastes a url that what they really want is an embed. This is bad product development. At first this was merely annoying when I was just creating regular pages but when I had to do some technical documentation and citation articles with many links, the ridiculousness of this was highlighted. I was shocked that there is no setting to change this or adjust its generation.

    Embeds can be useful but they should NOT be the hardcoded unchangeable result of pasting a url. Also, it is not an acceptable solution to install another plugin just to fix an obviously bad user experience.

    Summary
    A url should default to being pasted as a link with an option to convert it to an embed. Also, If someone wants pasted urls to always be embeds or always be links, there should be a wp setting for that to change the default.

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  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.ads-software.com Admin

    Pasting a URL on a line by itself will create an embed if it is capable of being embedded.

    However, note that “on a line by itself” is in there. If you want a link to stay a link, simply preface it with some text. It can be anything. “Link: URL” works fine.

    More commonly, we tend to tell people to make links that are actually links in the text. Highlight some words and put the link on those instead of having the link be its own description. It fits better into the existing text and makes more sense. It’s also far better for accessibility. Screen readers prefer words, not urls.

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