Description

I've often thought there is a subtle art to the humble hyperlink, that stalwart building block of hypertext, the stuff that Ted Nelson's Xanadu dream was made of.

The word hypertext was coined by Nelson and published in a paper delivered to a national conference of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1965. Adding to his design for a nonsequential writing tool, Nelson proposed a feature called "zippered lists," in which elements in one text would be linked to related or identical elements in other texts. Nelson's two interests, screen editing and nonsequential writing, were merging. With zippered lists, links could be made between large sections, small sections, whole pages, or single paragraphs. The writer and reader could manufacture a unique document by following a set of links between discrete documents that were "zipped" together.

Many precedents for the idea of hypertext existed in literature and science. The Talmud, for instance, is a sort of hypertext, with blocks of commentary arranged in concentric rectangles around the page. So are scholarly footnotes, with their numbered links between the main body of the text and supplementary scholarship.

In July 1945, long before Nelson turned his attention to electronic information systems, Vannevar Bush published an essay titled "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly, which described a hypothetical system of information storage and retrieval called "memex." Memex would allow readers to create personal indexes to documents, and to link passages from different documents together with special markers. While Bush's description was purely speculative, he gave a brilliant and influential preview of some of the features Nelson would attempt to realize in Xanadu.

The inventor's original hypertext design predicted most of the essential components of today's hypertext systems. Nonetheless, his talk to the Association for Computing Machinery had little impact. There was a brief burst of interest in this strange researcher, but although his ideas were intriguing, Nelson lacked the technical knowledge to prove that it was possible to build the system he envisioned.

I distinctly remember reading this 1995 Wired article on Ted Nelson and Xanadu when it was published. It had a profound impact on me. I've always remembered it, long after that initial read. I know it's novella long, but it's arguably the best single article I've ever read in Wired; I encourage you to read it in its entirety when you have time. It speaks volumes about the souls of computers-- and the software developers who love them.

Xanadu was vaporware long before the term even existed. You might think that Ted Nelson would be pleased that HTML and the world wide web have delivered much of the Xanadu dream, almost 40 years later. But you'd be wrong:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to prevent -- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

I suspect Wikipedia may be closer to Ted's vision of Xanadu: a self-contained constellation of highly interlinked information, with provisions for identity, versioning, and rights management.

But enough about the history of the hyperlink. How can we use them effectively in the here and now? I thoroughly enjoyed Philipp Lenssen's recent link usability tips. I liked it so much, in fact, that I'm using it as a template for a visual compendium of link usability tips-- the art of hyperlinking.

1. Ensure your links are large enough to easily click. When building links, don't run afoul of Fitt's Law. If what you're linking is small, make it bigger. If you can't make it bigger, at least fluff it up a bit with clickable borders so it's easier for people to accurately click. In the below screenshot, only the numbers are linked, which is a shame.

Example of small, hard to click hyperlinks

2. The first link is the most important one