Linking effectively

Last substantive revision: 2016-05-24

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.”
• including the article. e.g. “[the job posting]” is better than “the [job posting]” (example from The process of hiring our first cause-specific Program Officer, which uses the version I don’t like..)
• semantic web: links with meanings
• Do surrounding quotes count as part of the link? In other words, should we prefer ["Article Title"] or "[Article Title]"? An analogue with book titles cannot be made, because both [*Book Title*] and *[Book Title]* appear the same. Consider also fragments that include the quoted thing on one end, e.g. see [my Quora answer to the question "Should I eat?"], where excluding the quotes is impossible.

Links often emphasize text on a page (in many browsers links are underlined and colored differently). 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 imagine how a page would look if you removed all the hyperlinks. So this means using words like “here” for linking should be discouraged.

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