Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Because the author(s) of this article forgot what makes hypertext so powerful. (In fact, I think a lot of people have forgotten that. Don't be afraid to link things, people. Linking to something literally saves you the trouble of explaining it yourself. LINK MORE, PLEASE. I will click.)

This is a fine sentiment, but [you] [don't] [link] [every] [word] [in] [your] [sentence] to a dictionary website either, because you expect the reader to know English. In the same way it's perfectly fine to write an article with a target audience that understands the concepts being discussed. Not everything needs to be written for a general audience; this website is exclusively about cryptocurrency, and particularly dense with jargon and slang at that.

This is actually a bit amusing, because one of my favorite reading features on iPad is being able to click and hold on an arbitrary word to look it up.

Sure, the UI/UX of a traditional link isn't desirable, but I do want every word to be linkable to the dictionary.

You can copy-paste a word from the website into your search engine too. The website doesn't have to do anything. Just like the program you used on your iPad didn't do anything, it was the iPad providing the select-and-dictionary feature.

On the Mac too, you can just "force press" the touchpad on any word and a definition comes up. As a non-native English speaker, I use it quite a lot.

or highlight and ctrl+cmd+d :)

Sounds great as a feature of your client, not of every single site.

Firefox has an option for this in the right-click menu after selecting text (e.g. by double-clicking).

I'm pretty sure I've seen some of those ad afiliate javascript libraries that add links to words in a paragraphs back to some random website that used a matching keyword that looked very close to your example.

At least, way back before I started using blockers.

It's a poor speaker who blames the audience for not understanding.

Not every random reader of an article is in its intended audience. The audience the speaker is writing for understands the article fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com