(Hyper) Links About (Hyper) Links
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Heydon on the advantages of hyperlinking hypertext in an anchor element:
Sometimes
is called a hyperlink, or simply link. But it’s none of those things, and people who say it is are technically wrong (in the worst way).[…]
A
is an interactive element (that is, it is, if there is ahref). The text within an interactive element is sometimes referred to as label because it should tell you what the element does. Since anchors take you to specific places on the web, the text should tell you where to go or what you can do there.[…]
Web developers and content editors around the world make the mistake of do not create text that describes a link and actually fits into that linkThis is colossal [sic] regrettable, because the main thing is to be correct when writing Hypertext.
As for the place to which this anchor hyperlink refers, Jim Nielsen in 2003 discussed a number of considerations that play a role in the design of URLs. More recently, he has written about the the potential of well-designed URLs, – or more precisely, the human potential to change things:
If a slug text is to be human-friendly, i.e. readable by humans, then it must contain information that can change due to human error.
Swapping out the content of a URL is a groundbreaking change. If we started with a wonderful URL like this one:
…but decide that we now like “Docs” instead of “Almanac,” then we could do the following:
Of course, we would set up some kind of redirection on the server so that anyone trying to /almanac will be automatically redirected to /docs instead. But now we have a kind of technical debt to maintain that might not be any more dangerous than walking and chewing gum at the same time, but could become quite a nuisance much later. We have a zillion redirects to CSS-Tricks for a zillion different reasons, mostly purely human ones like typos. Remember the CSS-Tricks Chronicles we used to write? Botching the Roman numeral system was standard fare there. Check out the very last issue from 2001, titled “CSS-Tricks Choronicles XLI” and its URL:
https://css-tricks.com/css-tricks-chronicle-xxxxi/I’ve thought about this a lot while trying to organize the 7,000 or so articles on this site. For years we’ve maintained a “flat” structure, in the sense that the title of an article (after perhaps some slight changes) becomes the URL:
But I am starting to think about the content of this website in terms of type instead of title alone. For example, on this site we’ve always had “articles” with a few “links” sprinkled in alongside almanac “entries” and “guides” and other categories of content. We just never reflected that in our URLs because, well, the design is just too flat. Adding another layer for the type of content breaks the original URL!
Jay Hoffman also thought about it.
A dead link may not mean very much, even in the aggregate. But that’s not the case. One-way links, the way they exist on the web, where anyone can link to anything, is what makes the web universal. In fact, the first name for URLs was URIs, or Universal Resource Identifier. It’s right there in the name. And as Berners-Lee once pointed out“Its universality is essential.”
[…]
Time and again, when the Internet falls into crisis and parts of it are lost, the Internet Archive and similar initiatives come to the rescue. But even the Internet Archive struggles to protect itself from a flood of link rot that we seem unable to escape.
All this fits with recent reports that Google has decided to discontinue its URL shortener. All these goo.gl URLs have accumulated since the shortener was introduced in 2018?
All developers using links created with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* are affected, as these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25, 2025. We recommend transferring these links to another URL shortener provider.
However, there is a small consolation for Google itself:
Please note that goo.gl links generated through Google apps (such as Maps Sharing) will continue to work.
To be clear, this step is less a form of connection rot then it’s straight-up pruning to cut things off. If linkrot is like letting your hair go grey, then rejecting Google’s URL shortener is a total head shave. Nick Heer However, he believes that it also has a good side:
In principle, I support this devaluation because it is confusing and dangerous that Google’s own shortened URLs have the same domain as those created by third-party users. But this is a problem caused by Google because it designed its URLs poorly. It should never have been possible for someone else to create links using the same URL shortener that Google itself uses.
I tend to agree. The whole situation is a Rosemary’s Baby Dilemma that presents us with two terribly uncomfortable choices. The right, uncomfortable choice has been made, but we still have to deal with the implications of deleting part of the web context.
Heydon’s post put me on this trail, so I’ll link to it here so you can use it as a starting point.
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