Rough Type: Experiments in delinkification

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.