7 ms·

Keep stuff linkable

166 points by animaomnium 3y ago

afraca 3y ago
I find it quite odd and funny that the author specifically mentions Google, and his script has a function `def google_it(query):` but then in the function he uses DuckDuckGo. Is the author ashamed, or does he expect people to not trust DDG?
- drougge 3y ago
  His mention of Google also links to DDG, so I think it's all intentional. Possibly because the modern word for searching the internet is "to google".
leephillips 3y ago
I agree about the importance of links. In fact, when I come across an article about something that many others have written about, and it has no links or references, I often just don’t read it. But the links in this article, the ones generated by a script, are worse than useless. Meaning, they’re a waste of time that makes the text worse. First of all, they are set to open a new tab. Rude. Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise. If I want to know what wikipedia has plagiarized about a certain topic I can go there and look it up. Links are not an afterthought, something that can be usefully tacked on to the finished text. Each link should be genuinely helpful, or back up an assertion. Ideally, each one should be non-obvious.
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  Why is it rude to open a new tab? I truly hate when I’m trying to view a link and it navigates me away from what I’m reading. IMO new tabs should always be the default.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I don’t mind new tabs but what really annoys me is when things are set to open in a new window, and you have to fiddle with it to get it to merge back into the window you already have open
    - circuit10 3y ago
      I’m surprised that someone downvoted this, I thought this would be very uncontroversial. Is there someone who actually likes this for some reason?
      - dalmo3 3y ago
        I didn't downvote, but links opening a new browser window, except for the occasional auth pop-up, hasn't been a thing since... 2008? What browser still doesn't use tabs by default?
        circuit10 3y ago
        Websites can override the setting and force browsers to do it, and quite a lot of them seem to for some reason
    - twic 3y ago
      Browsers could do two little things. Firstly, when mousing over a link which will open in a new tab, show a different pointer. I get a hand with the index finger extended when hovering over a normal link; it could be that but with a diagonal arrow, like the common "open in new window" badge, for a link which opens in a new tab. Secondly, in the context menu for a link which will open in a new tab, replace the "open link in new tab" option with "open link in this tab". As long as links are real links, and not JavaScript devilry, this would 85% fix it for me.
  - nunuvit 3y ago
    It overrides the user's browser settings. As a user, technically you can override the override, but it's only accessible sometimes through hidden settings or user scripts.
  - leephillips 3y ago
    The reader should decide. It’s usually trivial to hold down a modifier key to open a link in a new tab or window, but if the `target` attribute is set in the link it’s not as easy to override it. This debate raged in the early days of the web: what is the better practice? A consensus emerged among web designers that leaving it to the reader makes more sense. I’m proud that I convinced J. Zeldman that his early practice of using `target='_blank'` hurt the user’s navigation, and so played a minuscule part in nudging designers in general away from this.
    - zo1 3y ago
      Unfortunately, with the advent of SPAs, Web3.0 and the takeover of the web by Angular and friends, we can no longer rely on "links" behaving that way. For the time-being, we've lost that battle and the web is worse-off as a result. I.e. A lot of the time, links are actually various DOM elements that have onclick handlers and various JS-fuckery meant to obfuscate true behavior from the user and make it more difficult for the user to control the browser. Worse still, how about the user-hostile behavior of browsers that now allow JS to takeover and disable right-click, select and copy functions.
      - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
        Worse than that, even if you somehow try to force onclick handlers to not obfuscate true behavior, most truly bad SPAs don't even have valid intermediary states accessible thru URLs; the only way to navigate the "application" is sometimes by changing the state with interactive SPA use.
      - cratermoon 3y ago
        Yes, deep-linking with SPAs is mostly broken. This came up here a few weeks ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472) Someone defended SPAs by pointing out that frameworks like React use Javascript and browser APIs to fake paths and history, and another noted that reimplementing basic browser functionality was madness.
  - kroltan 3y ago
    Middle mouse button (or control+click) in any browser opens a new tab (as long as you're using actual links, don't get me started on the morons who think "span with a onclick handler" is an acceptable substitute) Forcing to open on a new tab breaks conventional behaviour, it should be left as the user's decision (either explicit every time, or a setting in their browser. This setting already exists btw, if you like more tabs you can enable it in your browser). (Maybe a case could be made if the website is actually an application and there would be data loss if not for the new tab, but I would argue design your application so as data loss is not possible in that case) --- As for myself, the browsing history is something very useful to have, I like keeping the amount of tabs down to near one per activity, so I regularly use the history to go back to what I was reading before. Forcing new tabs means I have to reach for more advanced tools like tab trees, which are often not worth the cognitive effort.
    - Phurist 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - kevincox 3y ago
    People have different preferences. Personally I have set `browser.link.open_newwindow = 1` in Firefox to force all links to open in the same tab, then I can middle-click to open in a new tab. This way I can do what I want without worrying about what the website author thinks I wanted. It does have some downsides though. Some sites don't use <a> tags but instead <div> with JS to open the link, then you can't choose to open in a new tab (on the other hand they can't force you to open a new tab so it is sort of even on average). Some sites break because they are trying to launch a new window that communicates with the parent. But overall I think it is a big improvement to the web.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Because if the link is a normal one, the user can choose whether to open it in same tab (regular click) or a new tab (lots of UX shortcuts for this like Ctrl+click). But if the link is hardcoded as a new tab, the user has no choice. There's no way to open a new-tab link in the same tab. :( Not to mention that there's generally zero indication it's a new-tab link anyways, so not only does it take away choice, but it does so non-predictably. Ugh.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise. I sometimes link to the Wikipedia article when there are many things by a certain term, or when I'm using terminology that doesn't show up in search results (but is common in colloquial use). Should I do this a different way?
  - leephillips 3y ago
    You’re using links to disambiguate your terms; it makes sense. My unpopular opinion would be to keep linking as you’re doing, but find better sources than wikipedia. Something reliable and, if possible, authoritative, and that’s more likely to have stable content—where you can be a bit more sure that what your readers will see when they follow the link is what you saw.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- animaomnium 3y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to read the post and write a thoughtful reply. You make a good point: it is hard to find good links. These links suck. I apologize for this poor first-order approximation: I want to link to stuff interesting enough to merit a post or two in their own right. To that end, I keep a list of every interesting thing that I read. I plan to index that list, and make it searchable. Reliance on a search engine is a stop-gap to keep scope sensible at this point. There's nothing stopping other people from taking this idea and running with it. Given your personal involvement in this area, I understand your apprehension. Like you, I want to see a denser, more interesting web. But without tools to overcome the static friction of linking things together, I don't think we'll see density and utility of links increase any more than it already has. That's what I hoped to highlight in this piece.
  - leephillips 3y ago
    Well, I appreciate that you’re thinking about the problem of linking in general and writing about it. If finding and inserting appropriate links is laborious—well, so is writing. Linking is part of the process—part of the content. You can’t automate it away. Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information management system, and this makes keeping track of sources and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and other products out there designed to help with this task.
    - joelfried 3y ago
      > Almost a pleasure, in fact Could you elaborate a bit on your workflow that makes it almost enjoyable? My personal workflow can always use an upgrade and I'd love to hear what works for you!
      - leephillips 3y ago
        Very briefly, it depends on Pandoc with citeproc, and vim (lately nvim) with the vim-markdown plugin, which adds hiding to citeproc links, making the text easier to read in the editor. Next I have bibliographic information on every source that I use stored in a postgres database. I have a collection of scripts (in lua, python, bash, ...) so I can do what I want within the editor: supply a URL and have some information scraped from the page and stored in a note, one file per resource, with bibliographic information in YAML blocks and anything else that I want to add. Another script stores the important information from the YAML blocks into the database. I have a script that builds a bibtex file from the citeproc links in my document, for formatting bibliographies in the final version. I can generate HTML, PDF, DOCX, or plain text from the same source. The pleasure comes from having a set of keyboard shortcuts that let me jump instantly from a citeproc tag to my notes file, a local copy of the resource, or the copy on the web; also to search for notes with keywords, and a few more things. I can select part of my text and hit two keys to transform it into plain text or HTML with properly formatted links and references. For each notes file corresponding to a resource another keyboard shortcut brings up the list of articles referring to it, and I have a script to draw a graphviz graph of this reference network. I’ve built this up over the years; it’s a mess and no one else should use it. Maybe I’ll clean it up some day. It’s really paying off now for me though: I’m writing a book with about 50 references for each chapter; it would be unmanageable without some kind of system. I know that there’s Zotero and other systems out there. But I prefer that this work in the peculiar way that I like; these systems tend to become brain extensions and are somewhat personal.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  Yeah - I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found the sentiment behind this article, and the technical article itself, so very much at odds. - links aren’t dead: they’re vitally important. Links lend authority. [...] Don’t link to stuff you don’t trust, SEO or otherwise. - Linkoln normalizes the post, replacing each wikilink with the best corresponding hyperlink it could find on the web, using Google
diabolique_2 3y ago
Just a word of writing advice, if you link content inside the text it should be first or last word, never in the middle. It just takes a lot of effort to know what the link in the middle of the text is about.
- JasonFruit 3y ago
  I don't agree with that at all. For example, if I refer to violinists like [Oscar Shumsky] and [Yehudi Menuhin], and I create links from their names to relevant articles about them, I don't think you'd have any trouble figuring out what it's about. I think this article did a good job of that, linking from relevant text that clearly indicates the topic of the destination, except maybe for "Writing consistently…".
  - diabolique_2 3y ago
    Personally it constrains my eyes if the link is in the middle of article. It simply takes an extra effort. However, its not just me. You can find online a bunch of research on the topic. ps. no need to downvote, its just an advice :)
    - zztop44 3y ago
      Can you share the research on this topic? If I understand you correctly what you’re saying is very different to my experience (and how popular sites like Wikipedia etc work). So I’d like to read the research. I’ve tried to google a bit but can’t find anything yet and not 100% sure what keywords to search for.
      - diabolique_2 3y ago
        sorry it was weeks ago, And by spending 5 minutes googling i couldn't find it. However I can summarise the point of that article. It basically says since links stand out, first thing you read from paragraph are links. If the link is on the beginning of the article, you naturally read the link and continue reading it. If it's on the end of the article, you'll first read the link and after it go back to begging of reading paragraph. If it's in the middle, you'll wonder what the paragraph is about, so your eyes will naturally read the first few words of paragraph and after it a couple of end words of paragraph. Before continuing to read article. The author that wrote that article was obviously an expert in UI/UX and has spent a great deal thinking/doing articles. An example that you've mentioned, Wikipedia, it doesn't have such huge contrast between link and text, and I'm expecting it to be full of links.I suppose thats the reason why but I don't do the described behaviour on it. However I often find myself doing the described behaviour when reading blogs, making me ignore/stop reading the blogs that do a lot of linking.
montebicyclelo 3y ago
I think it's a cool idea. What would be even cooler would be if it would do a content based search of your browser history, and suggest the most relevant pages for the thing you want to link. So, ideally it would be finding the pages you actually looked at. (Although, in practice it becomes difficult when you use all kinds of different devices to browse with, plus whether there's enough information to search with to retrieve the page. But I imagine something could be thrown together that does work a decent percentage of the time.)
gavinhoward 3y ago
I am a blogger, and I'll stay a blogger even with GPT stuff. I agree. As bloggers continue to link only to good stuff between them, those blogs will become infinitely more valuable than the flood of trash that people will post from GPT. It seems hopeless that people will find that good stuff, but word of mouth will do it, I think.
- nwoli 3y ago
  Basically what people who went against the “we won’t be able to tell what’s real and not” deepfake narrative even 5 years ago predicted. Ie a web of trust will still keep up paths of believable high quality content etc
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  The internet seems ripe for the return of a service like StumbleUpon. I used to find all kinds of great niche content through that service. A much better way to kill time than endlessly refreshing a feed or shitposting -- it feels more like exploring the internet.
  - naravara 3y ago
    I know of a couple: - https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ - https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  I am waiting for the day that GPT can show it's work so to speak. i.e. "Debug last results" and get a list of all the trained input data including any URL's, books, text input and who performed the input, where the data came from. I am told this will never happen but I think courts will disagree once enough big mistakes and/or potential malfeasance or fraud occurs and people try to blame GPT. Or when GPT repeats the unsavory behavior we have all witnessed with social media algorithms leading to highly divisive outcomes.
  - softfalcon 3y ago
slushh 3y ago
>I have so many linkless posts waiting to be published: I could go ahead and publish them as-is, but by doing so I feel as though I’d be treating you, dear reader, unjustly. How about allowing the readers to participate? Posts could be in a pre-publish state and the community could add link suggestions and annotations.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  That sounds excellent! Thank you very much for this blog post. https://example.net/my-first-blogospam https://example.net/my-first-blogospam
mgaunard 3y ago
It's 2023. People (re)discover that the web is about hyperlinks. Incredible.
- nesarkvechnep 3y ago
  The amount of self proclaimed REST API devs who haven’t heard of hypermedia is at an all-time high.
  - expertentipp 3y ago
    Creating CRUDs has been so degraded that entry level to work on them is none. Unaware yet candidates don't even have to create a PDF. Companies recruit CRUD devs from Instagram and Twitter.
- tester457 3y ago
  I think the recent popularity of Obsidian, Roam and Logseq has something to do with it. People enjoy the power wikilinks have and love sharing their knowledge graphs[0]. [0] https://preslav.me/2022/09/01/logseq-come-for-the-graph-stay-for-the-journal/ https://preslav.me/2022/09/01/logseq-come-for-the-graph-stay...
  - packetlost 3y ago
    I love Logseq. I just wish it had a reasonable hosted backend so I can get my company to use it for their wiki software instead of Confluence.
kris-nova 3y ago
Wow. I thought this was going to be a big rant piece on why we should all go back to dynamic linking again and I was so ready to start my Monday off with a spicy take. But yes we should all also be adding links in our writing and publishing on our own platforms.
- wildpeaks 3y ago
  This is how I was using Twitter as well, as a network of people sharing interesting and often niche content (which is why algorithmic timelines are useless to me because the human curation was the entire value).
ericyd 3y ago
> Linkoln, no pun intended This seems disingenuous - clearly a pun is intended
otterpro 3y ago
I want to implement this in my Hugo blog build process. Initially, I thought it was ironic that there was not a single link to Linkoln, until I realized that code is on the article and there's no code in github. > The script itself is… pretty dumb. Actually, simple code is the best code.
joseph_grobbles 3y ago
Here's a better approach - never, ever include a link unless it is important and cogent to the topic. Humorous or casual linking is just noise, and it can shroud actually useful links. We all can find information, so it isn't valuable linking to the definition of phrases or words, etc. If you're referencing a study, link to the study. If you're citing a tweet, link to the tweet. Otherwise save spurious links as they add zero value and are a distraction and an unnecessary decoration making text less readable. As an aside, I chuckled seeing the link to Atwood's "be a bigshot blogger" post where he recommended that people blog constantly about everything. For those who haven't kept track, that was a failure model. It made people basically give up on "blogs" because there was so much low value content, with people writing on a schedule rather than because they had actually interesting content. Now everyone just hopes that the rare useful post appears on a social news or media site.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cratermoon 3y ago
Do most people write stuff and then go back and search for links to relevant content? As a writer, I'm continually inspired by things I read or watch, and when I find something, I add it to my references. I use Zotero[1], but it's not the only solution. When I start writing, I already have my notes and the links to sources and related content. I don't add in links as an afterthought, the writing is informed by the related material. Maybe, once in while, when I've done a couple of drafts and am getting close to the final version, I'll go back and add in links, but rarely do I spend time poking around on the web. I go to my references. Granted, the reference database takes effort to create and maintain, but the end result is far better than what I'd get just doing a web search for a term. 1 https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/
martin_a 3y ago
I'm not very convinced by the results of this "Auto Linker". I find most of the links in that article are rather useless, linking only to have a link to something. IMHO links should be chosen "wisely", with the intent of helping the reader to find more information on important parts of the article or referencing other work etc. Linking to the definition of rabbit holes is not really useful, if I'm not talking about varying sizes and depths of rabbit holes due to different breeds of rabbits and their prefered style of rabbit hole digging.
- truculent 3y ago
  How much of this is down to the examples chosen? It seems to me that in practice you would generally use it with a specific link in mind (like the "Rust prehistory" or "notes on a smaller rust") ones; although I can see that those might be a bit more cumbersome to show in the post, given that they might use longer queries.
  - martin_a 3y ago
    Wouldn't it be easier to place specific links at that point? If you know what you want to link to...
    - truculent 3y ago
      > It’s not that I don’t know what I want to link to. Most of the posts I write are responses to things I’ve read. I know what I want to link to, but I don’t want to lose flow to hunt down a link while writing. I could go back at the end and insert links retrospectively, but it takes more time than I’d like to hop between browser, editor, and what I was thinking about at that point. It would be nice if I could mark links as I write, while still being able to refine each link in-editor as I edit and revise later. > I wish there was a faster way to link the posts I write.
- nomel 3y ago
  > linking only to have a link to something I used to link to reduce redundancy in what I had to write. Now, I tend to duplicate large parts of documentation to remove links, because I found that people actively avoid links. I'm guessing this aversion is related to a unconscious awareness of the "doorway effect", which exist even in virtual environments, and I assume, to some degree, on web pages: > The doorway effect is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect
mschuster91 3y ago
As a political blogger and upcoming author, links to sources are damn important for me, for a multitude of reasons: - they allow me to back up claims with cold, hard facts instead of "pure hearsay" - they defend me from getting held liable... say someone files a libel suit/C&D order against me. If I have a link to a proper, accepted medium (e.g. a newspaper or a TV station), I can defend my claim by pointing to the original source(s). However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to link to stuff: - publishers decide to put interesting content behind paywalls, leading to a constant noise of "can't read, paywall" - publishers decide to re-launch their website, but not set proper redirects so all my archives are dead now - German public TV/radio has to take web articles and TV/radio archives offline after a few days or months, because private media got a court decision and then a legal provision forcing them to take down content [1] - some media absolutely LOVE live tickers, but you can't directly link to posts in these for posteriority [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren
lordgrenville 3y ago
Here's a snippet I use for this kind of thing: (defun my/org-insert-wikipedia-link () (interactive) (apply-to-region (lambda (string) "Convert a string to a link to English Wikipedia" (concat "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" (subst-char-in-string ? ?_ string) "][" string "]]")))) I imagine you could do something similar for the other examples in the post. Makes adding these links pretty painless.
CM30 3y ago
I 100% agree with this, and I try to stick by it for just about every article I write now. Does someone I'm interviewing talk about a game or movie they enjoyed as a kid? It'll get linked to the Wikipedia page for said work, or if possible a place the user can (legally) buy or experience it for themselves. Reference something I made in the past? That'll get linked where relevant, and the same goes for anything mentioned by a source too. And I'll always link to the original source if possible too, not the random reprint/paraphrased version from whatever popular news site or service covered it this time. Love the idea of using a script to help with this too, though it's usually the harder to find stuff that's more valuable to link to, not things you ca immediately find with a quick Google search (like the Google home page).
dingosity 3y ago
I love the concept of getting links "out of the way," though I did it slightly differently. Instead of having links in the body of the text, links in the text of my docs tend to be links to citations in a reference section on the same page. https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_so_plain.html https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_s...
djha-skin 3y ago
> It may be my lack of discipline This is where the article lost me. If it feels like a lack of discipline, it probably is. By placing links in an article, the author asserts that those were intentional choices just as much as were any of the other writing decisions made while making the post. The same thing goes for decisions surrounding the theme of the blog and what DNS name the blog is found under. The author is presenting an idea; more or less effort can be put into this, but it will show if effort isn't put into it. Not spending time on links is the equivalent of not spending time on citations, arguably one of the most important parts of an academic paper. It is almost as important a part of the writing as the writing itself.

166 points by animaomnium 3y ago

I find it quite odd and funny that the author specifically mentions Google, and his script has a function `def google_it(query):` but then in the function he uses DuckDuckGo. Is the author ashamed, or does he expect people to not trust DDG?

drougge 3y ago
His mention of Google also links to DDG, so I think it's all intentional. Possibly because the modern word for searching the internet is "to google".

leephillips 3y ago

I agree about the importance of links. In fact, when I come across an article about something that many others have written about, and it has no links or references, I often just don’t read it. But the links in this article, the ones generated by a script, are worse than useless. Meaning, they’re a waste of time that makes the text worse. First of all, they are set to open a new tab. Rude. Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise. If I want to know what wikipedia has plagiarized about a certain topic I can go there and look it up. Links are not an afterthought, something that can be usefully tacked on to the finished text. Each link should be genuinely helpful, or back up an assertion. Ideally, each one should be non-obvious.

blitz_skull 3y ago
Why is it rude to open a new tab? I truly hate when I’m trying to view a link and it navigates me away from what I’m reading. IMO new tabs should always be the default.
- circuit10 3y ago
  I don’t mind new tabs but what really annoys me is when things are set to open in a new window, and you have to fiddle with it to get it to merge back into the window you already have open
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I’m surprised that someone downvoted this, I thought this would be very uncontroversial. Is there someone who actually likes this for some reason?
    - dalmo3 3y ago
      I didn't downvote, but links opening a new browser window, except for the occasional auth pop-up, hasn't been a thing since... 2008? What browser still doesn't use tabs by default?
      - circuit10 3y ago
        Websites can override the setting and force browsers to do it, and quite a lot of them seem to for some reason
  - twic 3y ago
    Browsers could do two little things. Firstly, when mousing over a link which will open in a new tab, show a different pointer. I get a hand with the index finger extended when hovering over a normal link; it could be that but with a diagonal arrow, like the common "open in new window" badge, for a link which opens in a new tab. Secondly, in the context menu for a link which will open in a new tab, replace the "open link in new tab" option with "open link in this tab". As long as links are real links, and not JavaScript devilry, this would 85% fix it for me.
- nunuvit 3y ago
  It overrides the user's browser settings. As a user, technically you can override the override, but it's only accessible sometimes through hidden settings or user scripts.
- leephillips 3y ago
  The reader should decide. It’s usually trivial to hold down a modifier key to open a link in a new tab or window, but if the `target` attribute is set in the link it’s not as easy to override it. This debate raged in the early days of the web: what is the better practice? A consensus emerged among web designers that leaving it to the reader makes more sense. I’m proud that I convinced J. Zeldman that his early practice of using `target='_blank'` hurt the user’s navigation, and so played a minuscule part in nudging designers in general away from this.
  - zo1 3y ago
    Unfortunately, with the advent of SPAs, Web3.0 and the takeover of the web by Angular and friends, we can no longer rely on "links" behaving that way. For the time-being, we've lost that battle and the web is worse-off as a result. I.e. A lot of the time, links are actually various DOM elements that have onclick handlers and various JS-fuckery meant to obfuscate true behavior from the user and make it more difficult for the user to control the browser. Worse still, how about the user-hostile behavior of browsers that now allow JS to takeover and disable right-click, select and copy functions.
    - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
      Worse than that, even if you somehow try to force onclick handlers to not obfuscate true behavior, most truly bad SPAs don't even have valid intermediary states accessible thru URLs; the only way to navigate the "application" is sometimes by changing the state with interactive SPA use.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      Yes, deep-linking with SPAs is mostly broken. This came up here a few weeks ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472) Someone defended SPAs by pointing out that frameworks like React use Javascript and browser APIs to fake paths and history, and another noted that reimplementing basic browser functionality was madness.
- kroltan 3y ago
  Middle mouse button (or control+click) in any browser opens a new tab (as long as you're using actual links, don't get me started on the morons who think "span with a onclick handler" is an acceptable substitute) Forcing to open on a new tab breaks conventional behaviour, it should be left as the user's decision (either explicit every time, or a setting in their browser. This setting already exists btw, if you like more tabs you can enable it in your browser). (Maybe a case could be made if the website is actually an application and there would be data loss if not for the new tab, but I would argue design your application so as data loss is not possible in that case) --- As for myself, the browsing history is something very useful to have, I like keeping the amount of tabs down to near one per activity, so I regularly use the history to go back to what I was reading before. Forcing new tabs means I have to reach for more advanced tools like tab trees, which are often not worth the cognitive effort.
  - Phurist 3y ago
    [flagged]
- kevincox 3y ago
  People have different preferences. Personally I have set `browser.link.open_newwindow = 1` in Firefox to force all links to open in the same tab, then I can middle-click to open in a new tab. This way I can do what I want without worrying about what the website author thinks I wanted. It does have some downsides though. Some sites don't use <a> tags but instead <div> with JS to open the link, then you can't choose to open in a new tab (on the other hand they can't force you to open a new tab so it is sort of even on average). Some sites break because they are trying to launch a new window that communicates with the parent. But overall I think it is a big improvement to the web.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Because if the link is a normal one, the user can choose whether to open it in same tab (regular click) or a new tab (lots of UX shortcuts for this like Ctrl+click). But if the link is hardcoded as a new tab, the user has no choice. There's no way to open a new-tab link in the same tab. :( Not to mention that there's generally zero indication it's a new-tab link anyways, so not only does it take away choice, but it does so non-predictably. Ugh.
wizzwizz4 3y ago
> Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise. I sometimes link to the Wikipedia article when there are many things by a certain term, or when I'm using terminology that doesn't show up in search results (but is common in colloquial use). Should I do this a different way?
- leephillips 3y ago
  You’re using links to disambiguate your terms; it makes sense. My unpopular opinion would be to keep linking as you’re doing, but find better sources than wikipedia. Something reliable and, if possible, authoritative, and that’s more likely to have stable content—where you can be a bit more sure that what your readers will see when they follow the link is what you saw.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
animaomnium 3y ago
Thank you for taking the time to read the post and write a thoughtful reply. You make a good point: it is hard to find good links. These links suck. I apologize for this poor first-order approximation: I want to link to stuff interesting enough to merit a post or two in their own right. To that end, I keep a list of every interesting thing that I read. I plan to index that list, and make it searchable. Reliance on a search engine is a stop-gap to keep scope sensible at this point. There's nothing stopping other people from taking this idea and running with it. Given your personal involvement in this area, I understand your apprehension. Like you, I want to see a denser, more interesting web. But without tools to overcome the static friction of linking things together, I don't think we'll see density and utility of links increase any more than it already has. That's what I hoped to highlight in this piece.
- leephillips 3y ago
  Well, I appreciate that you’re thinking about the problem of linking in general and writing about it. If finding and inserting appropriate links is laborious—well, so is writing. Linking is part of the process—part of the content. You can’t automate it away. Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information management system, and this makes keeping track of sources and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and other products out there designed to help with this task.
  - joelfried 3y ago
    > Almost a pleasure, in fact Could you elaborate a bit on your workflow that makes it almost enjoyable? My personal workflow can always use an upgrade and I'd love to hear what works for you!
    - leephillips 3y ago
      Very briefly, it depends on Pandoc with citeproc, and vim (lately nvim) with the vim-markdown plugin, which adds hiding to citeproc links, making the text easier to read in the editor. Next I have bibliographic information on every source that I use stored in a postgres database. I have a collection of scripts (in lua, python, bash, ...) so I can do what I want within the editor: supply a URL and have some information scraped from the page and stored in a note, one file per resource, with bibliographic information in YAML blocks and anything else that I want to add. Another script stores the important information from the YAML blocks into the database. I have a script that builds a bibtex file from the citeproc links in my document, for formatting bibliographies in the final version. I can generate HTML, PDF, DOCX, or plain text from the same source. The pleasure comes from having a set of keyboard shortcuts that let me jump instantly from a citeproc tag to my notes file, a local copy of the resource, or the copy on the web; also to search for notes with keywords, and a few more things. I can select part of my text and hit two keys to transform it into plain text or HTML with properly formatted links and references. For each notes file corresponding to a resource another keyboard shortcut brings up the list of articles referring to it, and I have a script to draw a graphviz graph of this reference network. I’ve built this up over the years; it’s a mess and no one else should use it. Maybe I’ll clean it up some day. It’s really paying off now for me though: I’m writing a book with about 50 references for each chapter; it would be unmanageable without some kind of system. I know that there’s Zotero and other systems out there. But I prefer that this work in the peculiar way that I like; these systems tend to become brain extensions and are somewhat personal.
horsawlarway 3y ago
Yeah - I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found the sentiment behind this article, and the technical article itself, so very much at odds. - links aren’t dead: they’re vitally important. Links lend authority. [...] Don’t link to stuff you don’t trust, SEO or otherwise. - Linkoln normalizes the post, replacing each wikilink with the best corresponding hyperlink it could find on the web, using Google

diabolique_2 3y ago

Just a word of writing advice, if you link content inside the text it should be first or last word, never in the middle. It just takes a lot of effort to know what the link in the middle of the text is about.

JasonFruit 3y ago
I don't agree with that at all. For example, if I refer to violinists like [Oscar Shumsky] and [Yehudi Menuhin], and I create links from their names to relevant articles about them, I don't think you'd have any trouble figuring out what it's about. I think this article did a good job of that, linking from relevant text that clearly indicates the topic of the destination, except maybe for "Writing consistently…".
- diabolique_2 3y ago
  Personally it constrains my eyes if the link is in the middle of article. It simply takes an extra effort. However, its not just me. You can find online a bunch of research on the topic. ps. no need to downvote, its just an advice :)
  - zztop44 3y ago
    Can you share the research on this topic? If I understand you correctly what you’re saying is very different to my experience (and how popular sites like Wikipedia etc work). So I’d like to read the research. I’ve tried to google a bit but can’t find anything yet and not 100% sure what keywords to search for.
    - diabolique_2 3y ago
      sorry it was weeks ago, And by spending 5 minutes googling i couldn't find it. However I can summarise the point of that article. It basically says since links stand out, first thing you read from paragraph are links. If the link is on the beginning of the article, you naturally read the link and continue reading it. If it's on the end of the article, you'll first read the link and after it go back to begging of reading paragraph. If it's in the middle, you'll wonder what the paragraph is about, so your eyes will naturally read the first few words of paragraph and after it a couple of end words of paragraph. Before continuing to read article. The author that wrote that article was obviously an expert in UI/UX and has spent a great deal thinking/doing articles. An example that you've mentioned, Wikipedia, it doesn't have such huge contrast between link and text, and I'm expecting it to be full of links.I suppose thats the reason why but I don't do the described behaviour on it. However I often find myself doing the described behaviour when reading blogs, making me ignore/stop reading the blogs that do a lot of linking.

montebicyclelo 3y ago

I think it's a cool idea. What would be even cooler would be if it would do a content based search of your browser history, and suggest the most relevant pages for the thing you want to link. So, ideally it would be finding the pages you actually looked at. (Although, in practice it becomes difficult when you use all kinds of different devices to browse with, plus whether there's enough information to search with to retrieve the page. But I imagine something could be thrown together that does work a decent percentage of the time.)

gavinhoward 3y ago

I am a blogger, and I'll stay a blogger even with GPT stuff. I agree. As bloggers continue to link only to good stuff between them, those blogs will become infinitely more valuable than the flood of trash that people will post from GPT. It seems hopeless that people will find that good stuff, but word of mouth will do it, I think.

nwoli 3y ago
Basically what people who went against the “we won’t be able to tell what’s real and not” deepfake narrative even 5 years ago predicted. Ie a web of trust will still keep up paths of believable high quality content etc
vanilla_nut 3y ago
The internet seems ripe for the return of a service like StumbleUpon. I used to find all kinds of great niche content through that service. A much better way to kill time than endlessly refreshing a feed or shitposting -- it feels more like exploring the internet.
- naravara 3y ago
  I know of a couple: - https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ - https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/
LinuxBender 3y ago
I am waiting for the day that GPT can show it's work so to speak. i.e. "Debug last results" and get a list of all the trained input data including any URL's, books, text input and who performed the input, where the data came from. I am told this will never happen but I think courts will disagree once enough big mistakes and/or potential malfeasance or fraud occurs and people try to blame GPT. Or when GPT repeats the unsavory behavior we have all witnessed with social media algorithms leading to highly divisive outcomes.
- softfalcon 3y ago

slushh 3y ago

>I have so many linkless posts waiting to be published: I could go ahead and publish them as-is, but by doing so I feel as though I’d be treating you, dear reader, unjustly. How about allowing the readers to participate? Posts could be in a pre-publish state and the community could add link suggestions and annotations.

wizzwizz4 3y ago
That sounds excellent! Thank you very much for this blog post. https://example.net/my-first-blogospam https://example.net/my-first-blogospam

mgaunard 3y ago

It's 2023. People (re)discover that the web is about hyperlinks. Incredible.

nesarkvechnep 3y ago
The amount of self proclaimed REST API devs who haven’t heard of hypermedia is at an all-time high.
- expertentipp 3y ago
  Creating CRUDs has been so degraded that entry level to work on them is none. Unaware yet candidates don't even have to create a PDF. Companies recruit CRUD devs from Instagram and Twitter.
tester457 3y ago
I think the recent popularity of Obsidian, Roam and Logseq has something to do with it. People enjoy the power wikilinks have and love sharing their knowledge graphs[0]. [0] https://preslav.me/2022/09/01/logseq-come-for-the-graph-stay-for-the-journal/ https://preslav.me/2022/09/01/logseq-come-for-the-graph-stay...
- packetlost 3y ago
  I love Logseq. I just wish it had a reasonable hosted backend so I can get my company to use it for their wiki software instead of Confluence.

kris-nova 3y ago

Wow. I thought this was going to be a big rant piece on why we should all go back to dynamic linking again and I was so ready to start my Monday off with a spicy take. But yes we should all also be adding links in our writing and publishing on our own platforms.

wildpeaks 3y ago
This is how I was using Twitter as well, as a network of people sharing interesting and often niche content (which is why algorithmic timelines are useless to me because the human curation was the entire value).

ericyd 3y ago

> Linkoln, no pun intended This seems disingenuous - clearly a pun is intended

otterpro 3y ago

I want to implement this in my Hugo blog build process. Initially, I thought it was ironic that there was not a single link to Linkoln, until I realized that code is on the article and there's no code in github. > The script itself is… pretty dumb. Actually, simple code is the best code.

joseph_grobbles 3y ago

Here's a better approach - never, ever include a link unless it is important and cogent to the topic. Humorous or casual linking is just noise, and it can shroud actually useful links. We all can find information, so it isn't valuable linking to the definition of phrases or words, etc. If you're referencing a study, link to the study. If you're citing a tweet, link to the tweet. Otherwise save spurious links as they add zero value and are a distraction and an unnecessary decoration making text less readable. As an aside, I chuckled seeing the link to Atwood's "be a bigshot blogger" post where he recommended that people blog constantly about everything. For those who haven't kept track, that was a failure model. It made people basically give up on "blogs" because there was so much low value content, with people writing on a schedule rather than because they had actually interesting content. Now everyone just hopes that the rare useful post appears on a social news or media site.

deleted 3y ago
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cratermoon 3y ago

Do most people write stuff and then go back and search for links to relevant content? As a writer, I'm continually inspired by things I read or watch, and when I find something, I add it to my references. I use Zotero[1], but it's not the only solution. When I start writing, I already have my notes and the links to sources and related content. I don't add in links as an afterthought, the writing is informed by the related material. Maybe, once in while, when I've done a couple of drafts and am getting close to the final version, I'll go back and add in links, but rarely do I spend time poking around on the web. I go to my references. Granted, the reference database takes effort to create and maintain, but the end result is far better than what I'd get just doing a web search for a term. 1 https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/

martin_a 3y ago

I'm not very convinced by the results of this "Auto Linker". I find most of the links in that article are rather useless, linking only to have a link to something. IMHO links should be chosen "wisely", with the intent of helping the reader to find more information on important parts of the article or referencing other work etc. Linking to the definition of rabbit holes is not really useful, if I'm not talking about varying sizes and depths of rabbit holes due to different breeds of rabbits and their prefered style of rabbit hole digging.

truculent 3y ago
How much of this is down to the examples chosen? It seems to me that in practice you would generally use it with a specific link in mind (like the "Rust prehistory" or "notes on a smaller rust") ones; although I can see that those might be a bit more cumbersome to show in the post, given that they might use longer queries.
- martin_a 3y ago
  Wouldn't it be easier to place specific links at that point? If you know what you want to link to...
  - truculent 3y ago
    > It’s not that I don’t know what I want to link to. Most of the posts I write are responses to things I’ve read. I know what I want to link to, but I don’t want to lose flow to hunt down a link while writing. I could go back at the end and insert links retrospectively, but it takes more time than I’d like to hop between browser, editor, and what I was thinking about at that point. It would be nice if I could mark links as I write, while still being able to refine each link in-editor as I edit and revise later. > I wish there was a faster way to link the posts I write.
nomel 3y ago
> linking only to have a link to something I used to link to reduce redundancy in what I had to write. Now, I tend to duplicate large parts of documentation to remove links, because I found that people actively avoid links. I'm guessing this aversion is related to a unconscious awareness of the "doorway effect", which exist even in virtual environments, and I assume, to some degree, on web pages: > The doorway effect is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect

mschuster91 3y ago

As a political blogger and upcoming author, links to sources are damn important for me, for a multitude of reasons: - they allow me to back up claims with cold, hard facts instead of "pure hearsay" - they defend me from getting held liable... say someone files a libel suit/C&D order against me. If I have a link to a proper, accepted medium (e.g. a newspaper or a TV station), I can defend my claim by pointing to the original source(s). However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to link to stuff: - publishers decide to put interesting content behind paywalls, leading to a constant noise of "can't read, paywall" - publishers decide to re-launch their website, but not set proper redirects so all my archives are dead now - German public TV/radio has to take web articles and TV/radio archives offline after a few days or months, because private media got a court decision and then a legal provision forcing them to take down content [1] - some media absolutely LOVE live tickers, but you can't directly link to posts in these for posteriority [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren

lordgrenville 3y ago

Here's a snippet I use for this kind of thing: (defun my/org-insert-wikipedia-link () (interactive) (apply-to-region (lambda (string) "Convert a string to a link to English Wikipedia" (concat "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" (subst-char-in-string ? ?_ string) "][" string "]]")))) I imagine you could do something similar for the other examples in the post. Makes adding these links pretty painless.

CM30 3y ago

I 100% agree with this, and I try to stick by it for just about every article I write now. Does someone I'm interviewing talk about a game or movie they enjoyed as a kid? It'll get linked to the Wikipedia page for said work, or if possible a place the user can (legally) buy or experience it for themselves. Reference something I made in the past? That'll get linked where relevant, and the same goes for anything mentioned by a source too. And I'll always link to the original source if possible too, not the random reprint/paraphrased version from whatever popular news site or service covered it this time. Love the idea of using a script to help with this too, though it's usually the harder to find stuff that's more valuable to link to, not things you ca immediately find with a quick Google search (like the Google home page).

dingosity 3y ago

I love the concept of getting links "out of the way," though I did it slightly differently. Instead of having links in the body of the text, links in the text of my docs tend to be links to citations in a reference section on the same page. https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_so_plain.html https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_s...

djha-skin 3y ago

> It may be my lack of discipline This is where the article lost me. If it feels like a lack of discipline, it probably is. By placing links in an article, the author asserts that those were intentional choices just as much as were any of the other writing decisions made while making the post. The same thing goes for decisions surrounding the theme of the blog and what DNS name the blog is found under. The author is presenting an idea; more or less effort can be put into this, but it will show if effort isn't put into it. Not spending time on links is the equivalent of not spending time on citations, arguably one of the most important parts of an academic paper. It is almost as important a part of the writing as the writing itself.