Link tags: hyperlinks

Daring Fireball: Kottke on the Art and Power of Hypertextual Writing

Hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

Long live hypertext! – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

This is how I write:

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

unrot•link

Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.

No more 404

I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:

When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.

I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.

This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.

The perfect link - The A11Y Collective

How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.

A Well-Known Links Resource - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I really like this experiment that Jim is conducting on his own site. I might try to replicate it sometime!

Interfacecritique — Olia Lialina: From My To Me

Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.

Why are hyperlinks blue?

A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.

A Short History of Bi-Directional Links

A wonderful look at the kind of links we didn’t get on the World Wide Web.

From the memex and Xanadu right up to web mentions, this ticks all my boxes!

(And can I just say, it’s so much fun to explore all of Maggie Appleton’s site …or should I say web garden.)

Indexing My Blog’s Links - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

You might not think this is a big deal, and maybe it’s not, but I love the idea behind the indie web: a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. Seeing everything you’ve ever linked to in one place really drives home how much of the web’s content, made by individuals, is under corporate control and identity.

Quotebacks and hypertexts (Interconnected)

What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)

I am very much enjoying Matt’s thoughts on linking, quoting, transclusion, and associative trails.

My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.

And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.

Anil Dash on the war on hyperlinks.

It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

A Love Letter to Net.Art - The History of the Web

Click around the site a bit and you’ll find yourself tied to an endless string of hyperlinks, hopping from one page to the next, with no real rhyme or reason to tie them altogether. It is almost pure web id, unleashed structurally to engage your curiosity and make use of the web’s most primal feature: the link.

How Google warped the hyperlink | WIRED UK

Ignore the ludicrously clickbaity title. This is a well-considered look at thirty years of linking on the World Wide Web.

The Man Who Invented The Web - TIME

This seventeen year old profile of Tim Berners-Lee is fascinating to read from today’s perspective.

Follow the links | A Working Library

The ability to follow links down and around and through an idea, landing hours later on some random Wikipedia page about fungi you cannot recall how you discovered, is one of the great modes of the web. It is, I’ll go so far to propose, one of the great modes of human thinking.

The Failed Promise of Deep Links — Backchannel — Medium

A really great piece by Scott Rosenberg that uses the myopic thinking behind “deep linking” in native apps as a jumping-off point to delve into the history of hypertext and the web.

It’s kind of weird that he didn’t (also) publish this on his own site though.

Apps Everywhere, but No Unifying Link - NYTimes.com

But as people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use — more like the web before search engines.

Sparkicons and the humble hyperlink by Mark Boulton

I really like Mark’s idea of standardised “sparkicons” …for a while there, reading this, I was worried he was going to propose something like Snap Preview. shudder

Scripting News: Why apps are not the future

Spot. On.

The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub.