Linkification

Scott Rosenberg has posted the first of a three-part series of posts in defence of links:

For 15 years, I've been doing most of my writing – aside from my two books – on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can't link!

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article's links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I'm unfamiliar.

There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr's "delinkification" critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let's zero in on Carr's case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his "delinkification" post. [...]

This first post suggests that some of the studies into the relationship between reading, comprehension and hyperlinks cited by Nicholas Carr weren't looking at hyperlinks as they're used in the vast majority of web-based writing today. I look forward to seeing where Rosenberg takes the argument in his next two pieces.

Tomorrow, in the next post in this series, I'll examine some of the ways links are being misused on the Web today – driven not by some abstract belief in the virtues of hypertext but rather by crude business imperatives. Then, in the final installment, I'll make the case for good linking practices as a source of badly needed context and a foundation for trust.

For what it's worth, when I read Nicholas Carr's post experimenting with delinkification I did consider whether it might be worth adopting the idea, but concluded that it's a technique particularly ill-suited to a linklog like this site.

If I were in the habit of writing longer think-pieces then my gut feeling – based, I'll freely admit, primarily on the way I've learned to read pieces on the web since I first encountered it in late 1992/early 1993 – is that it's much more helpful to have the link appear at the point in the text at which I discuss the material at the other end of the link than it is to require the reader to bounce between the text and a list of links at the end of the piece¹ to get the full sense of my argument.

The key, to my mind, is that it's up to the reader to choose whether to hare off after my link as soon as it appears or to defer following it until they've reached the end of my argument. As long as I don't style my link text in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to skim the entire sentence² I think that readers should be fine dealing with a few links scattered here and there throughout my piece.

1. Or in footnotes/endnotes, or in a sidebar. And yes, I do notice the irony of my placing this text in a footnote. ↩
2. By which I mean, for example, styling the text in a way that jars with the surrounding, non-linked text. ↩