
Rough Type: Experiments in delinkification - bdfh42
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/experiments_in.php
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DenisM
The crux of the argument:

 _The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's
also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote
gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a
link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it._

I must say I am sympathetic. I have recently even developed a habit of opening
long articles on the iPad instead of the laptop because there are fewer
temptations to wander away and thus more chance of reading the article.

~~~
inerte
I click with the mouse middle button, and in most browsers, a background tab
will open. So I can keep reading the current page and have the other already
loaded by the time I decide to close the parent page.

And using Opera, it's just a matter of a few mouse gestures :p

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junklight
Interesting.

The way I usually deal with this is to right click links I want to follow and
open them in new tabs (and I have my browser set so it doesn't move focus to
those new tabs). I can then follow up in my own time. I either eventually get
to open tabs or for longer things instapaper them to read on my phone later.
The fact I have a strategy for dealing with this would suggest I
subconsciously see it as a cognitive load.

It would be really good to see some proper research on this - with a brain
scanner and watching the cognitive activity in real time as people dealt with
the article.

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commieneko
Nonsense. The link is there for a reason or it is there superfluously. It's up
to the user/reader to decide to follow the link.

Having said that, it is poor writing to simply link to an aside and not
summarize or succinctly quote, in the body of your text, the link's referent.
This means that the reader _must_ go off on the link to in order to understand
your point. This I find very annoying and widely practiced. (It is also widely
practiced to assume that a reader already is familiar with another piece or
concept and _not_ linking to further information...)

The bigger problem is that our browsers and web pages are poorly designed for
such types of referencing. Earlier, pre-web, browsers tried a number of
models, but all required lots of screen real estate. See Ted Nelson's writings
for further examples (wink...)

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JoshCole
If this is the case it seems to me that things which function like
readability, a bookmarklet which transforms webpages into a more readable
format, should cause links to be replaced by footnotes. After all, their goal
is to remove clutter so that reading is more enjoyable.

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zokier
If you want to put links into the end, that's ok. But please number them and
refer to them by those numbers in the main body. Giving bunch of links at the
bottom with no context leaves user guessing which one was the one he was
interested in.

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amanuel
The complaint should be lodged against the current browser behavior rather
than linking itself.

The cognitive cost to follow the link is not cheap because of how browsers
work and the way linking is generally used today (even using tabs/additional
windows).

Overall I see the article as a call to improving browser technology and more
thought and effort by the authors as they write and decide what to link and
what not to link.

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kes
Why not simply have two CSS files? One would show the links in the same style
as the main text, one would show the links so they can be explored.

A simple button next to each post and you could choose depending on your
wants.

(Note: I am not a 1337 haX0r, so I could also be very dumb.)

~~~
spc476
I played around with this eight years ago (
[http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/hypertext/fragment...](http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/hypertext/fragment/)
) and it wasn't hard then (no Javascript either). In fact, I used four
different options of displaying links. No guarantees on the external links
working any more though ...

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jkrall
I don't buy this argument. I have no trouble reading fresh, interesting
content without feeling the need to jump away on an embedded link.

The reason that I click a link is that I've lost interest, or have found new
interest, in something that the author is referring to. Why is this a bad
thing?

Context-switching on the web is cheap enough that I shouldn't have to scroll
to the end of an article to find a link to something more interesting than
what I'm reading right now.

Meanwhile, the links at the end of this article are not helpful. They have no
context, and require me to think back through the article to decide if I want
to read them.

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xenophanes
It's not delinkification. It's just link reorganizing. They are still all
there.

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drivebyacct
Infuriating. When a piece of content doesn't make supplementary, albeit
secondary content, easily accessible, it ruins part of the readability and
relevance of the article.

