What is "mystery meat navigation"

n. (context informal derogatory Internet English) A system of navigation on a website in which the user cannot immediately determine the target of any hyperlink but has to interact with it in some way (such as hovering with the mouse).

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet " mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

Flanders originally and temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation in reference to the Saturn Corporation, whose company website epitomized this phenomenon. Flanders writes, "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them".