Other label for link-text instead of "title" to prevent confusion w. title attribute?

Anchor is not the correct term because anchor is for the name attribute but title is confusing and will need to be changed when customized title attributes are added. "Display text" would probably be better.

"Anchor text" sounds like a poor option for most users, who don't even know that links are technically referred to as "anchor" tags.

I agree it's not a good idea to create new terms. The HTML spec already has a term for this: "title attribute." This should not be described in terms of behavior (e.g. "hover text") as the actual behavior differs between browsers.

thx 4 the effort @ all! But some of you underly a missunderstanding here. To clarify: The problem occurs because of an addtional option in the link field module, that - if turned on and configured in manage fields as "show text as link" - we have an optional text between the </a> tags here, which could be correctly understood as a kind of title (like in menu items). On the other hand we have another html attribute correctly called 'title attribute' (which shows on mouse-hover and has its relevance for SEO), and sadly we also have many different usage of 'title' , 'title_settings', desciption values using 'title' and many more in the code for these and many other purposes.

Finally, it is understandable for me that you come to the conclusion, there is a separation in need. But this is not where we come from. And even if that means sadly, working thru' ALL the code and trying not to mess it up by changing names, variables and variables holding names (where is my big coffee can), I wouldn't bother to do it. But it is also a change away from how it was meant to be. And after thinking about it for a while, it turns out to me, that it isn't a good idea to rush here. Since we have many written tests, views module dependencies and finally no clue if the change of 300 lines will definitely make sense. Technically many things you already mentioned are correct, some of them half correct :-). Lets break it down:

First of all, for the end user, a "link" is a reference, which addresses another spot to jump to by clicking on it. For themers, thinking of links from use in body text, a clickable link-area is a linked, </a> tag surrounding text (as you mentionend as "anchor text"), or a linked </a> tag surrounding image (what would be the anchor image? whatever). But in the case of our link field (module) it is rather more like with the "creating menu items" logic - it is more about the link itself, seperately - plus all the other optional use cases like mailto etc. It is a field first of all! And in addition to that, in several cases, we still don't want to see the address and hide it by a describing text or put the text in front of it as a kind of label. But our text option is not taken out from or inline with a body text. And in several use-cases it isn't even surrounded by the -a- tag. And finally, all what we talk about here is shown in a seperated field and rather more describing the link or the spot we link to. This is like ... ? exactly ... like the "title" of a menu item. That's why the linked text is called "title" here for some of your confusion.

And as you find out by yourself: how to call it then? Linked text? Display text? Linktitletext? :-) Again, we don't come from body text in this case. We have a separated link field here. It sounds maybe weird for some followers to discuss that here, but it isn't a easy desicion to make, preventing tons if lil' changes in code over all. It all will confuse from one point or the other, and the issue starts here for some of you because the so-called "title" is hard for you to seperate from 'title attribute' in mind, or from your thinking that it is nothing else then a text, which gets surrounded by the </a> tag to turn into a link if we won't show the link itself. But it's not exactly like that. And - by the way - in most cases, I would assume, it will be the same text than in the title attribute anyway, because why affirming something else here than in the title attribute on a link field? But that's only a besides comment.

EDIT: We actually have a code freeze on 6.x and 7.x-1.0 (read here why: #1269718: Blockers to a 7.x-1.0 release?) I have marked 300 points in code, were the title variable or the title as readable user-text occurs. But after thinking about it twice or more, I will make the decision here NOT to change "title". There is already a separation of 'title' and 'title attribute' and we maybe can put some words about it in the description values. But thats it.

But thanks for the effort from all of you. Feel free to provide patches for description suggestions, but I will close the issue now.

I put the comment above (EDIT:)

Just as user feedback:
I also stumbled over this issue. From my view, renaming all occurances of Link Title to Link Text in the UI, would make more sense (for most? cases).
So, no code change, just UI-Text's, as a translation would do.