--- title: Linking effectively #description: none author: Issa Rice creation_date: 2015-01-03 last_major_revision_date: 2015-07-05 language: English # accepts "notes", "draft", "in progress", or "mostly finished" status: notes # accepts "certain", "highly likely", "likely", "possible", "unlikely", "highly unlikely", "remote", "impossible", "log", "emotional", or "fiction" belief: possible # accepts "CC0", "CC-BY", or "CC-BY-SA" license: CC0 tags: writing, content creation aliases: hyperlink, hyperlinks, hyperlinking effectively, effective linking --- Some places to look: - (seems decent if basic) - (see the section near the bottom; seems to be overlap with the first link, but also has new info?) Things to talk about: - linking in PDFs versus HTML - relative vs absolute links - include examples - linking in e.g. plaintext email, where *only* exposed links are possible - URL shorteners? - using colon and parentheses effectively. remembering that some software won't be able to tell if adjacent punctuation is part of the link, so adding spaces that might look awkward accordingly - long exposed links appear poorly on mobile browsers - when to use linking style like (1, 2, 3) or (here, here, and here) or (more) (GiveWell does the third.) - internal vs external links - email obfuscation in links? (what pandoc does) - referrer masking - when to use footnotes, when to use links, when to use parentheses - From LW boring advice: "Never post a web link that requires a reader to click on it to find out if they want to click on it." - semantic web: links with meanings Links often emphasize text on a page. So consider the sentence “Stopping X shouldn’t be a high priority.” It would be natural to hyperlink this to something that argues this point like so: “Stopping X [shouldn’t be a high priority].” This gets the emphasis right. But now what if we wanted the following nuanced alternative? “I don’t think stopping X should be a high priority.” Then consider the straightforward hyperlink translation: “I don’t think stopping X [should be a high priority].” Ah, but now someone quickly scanning the article might now accidentally interpret that stopping X should be a high priority!! Instead we want something like: “I [don’t think stopping X should be a high priority].” Or: “I don’t think stopping X should be a [high priority].” A general rule is, you should always image how a page would look if you removed all the hyperlinks. So this means using words like “here” for linking should be discouraged.