Linking effectively

Created: 2015-01-03; last major update: 2015-07-05
Status: notes; belief: possible

Some places to look:

http://www.catie.ca/sites/default/files/hyperlinking-04.pdf (seems decent if basic)
http://www.digitalbusiness.gov.au/creating-your-website/creating-and-organising-content/using-hyperlinks-effectively/ (see the section near the bottom; seems to be overlap with the first link, but also has new info?)

Things to talk about:

linking in PDFs versus HTML
relative vs absolute links
include examples
linking in e.g. plaintext email, where only exposed links are possible
URL shorteners?
- using colon and parentheses effectively. remembering that some software won’t be able to tell if adjacent punctuation is part of the link, so adding spaces that might look awkward accordingly
long exposed links appear poorly on mobile browsers
when to use linking style like (1, 2, 3) or (here, here, and here) or (more) (GiveWell does the third.)
internal vs external links
email obfuscation in links? (what pandoc does)
referrer masking
when to use footnotes, when to use links, when to use parentheses
From LW boring advice: “Never post a web link that requires a reader to click on it to find out if they want to click on it.”
semantic web: links with meanings

Links often emphasize text on a page. So consider the sentence “Stopping X shouldn’t be a high priority.” It would be natural to hyperlink this to something that argues this point like so: “Stopping X [shouldn’t be a high priority].” This gets the emphasis right. But now what if we wanted the following nuanced alternative?

“I don’t think stopping X should be a high priority.” Then consider the straightforward hyperlink translation:

“I don’t think stopping X [should be a high priority].” Ah, but now someone quickly scanning the article might now accidentally interpret that stopping X should be a high priority!! Instead we want something like:

“I [don’t think stopping X should be a high priority].” Or:

“I don’t think stopping X should be a [high priority].”

A general rule is, you should always image how a page would look if you removed all the hyperlinks. So this means using words like “here” for linking should be discouraged.

Tags: content creation, writing.

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