Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrown_22 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've noticed more and more is that I've been trained to _not_ click links in a page but search for the same thing in google. Hyperlinks are now the navigation bar inside a website and little else. Checking the last 10 pages I have opened the majority of them from reputable sites either don't have links or don't have useful links.

It's kind of bizarre that the main selling feature of HTML is basically lost today.

View on HN

I think you touch on a valid point about changes in the way content is presented online, but I also think you're really underselling just how utterly transformative the Web has been.

Like, you say you don't click links because you use Google instead... but Google search returns links. It could not even function without links. Keyword search is even one of the listed goals in the proposal, because prior to the Web, there was no singular place to find and retrieve information like that:

> At CERN, a variety of data is already available: reports, experiment data, personnel data, electronic mail address lists, computer documentation, experiment documentation, and many other sets of data are spinning around on computer discs continuously. It is however impossible to "jump" from one set to another in an automatic way [...] Usually, you will have to use a different lookup-method on a different computer with a different user interface. Once you have located information, it is hard to keep a link to it or to make a private note about it that you will later be able to find quickly.

That's how utterly different the world was without the Web. You couldn't open ten pages from different sources in one application and then Google for something in a new tab. Every single way of accessing information would've been its own distinct application, without much overlap or interoperability between them. Any attempt to build a search engine like Google or a content aggregator like HN would've been stymied by the sheer variety of formats and standards for presenting information.

> At CERN, a variety of data is already available

This proposal was more CERN-focussed than I had imagined. That said, my search came up negative on each of 'math', 'formula' and 'equation'.

Was this a strategic omission to make the project more tractable? I would not be surprised had the proposal been directed to a non-science community, but at CERN?

I think it was just too early in the project for that. Images were still considered a nice-to-have and (as far as I can tell) HTML hadn't even been proposed yet. It mentions the potential for a markup language, but it also says that they don't want to force users to adopt any particular markup language and mentions word processed documents as a potential node format. Perhaps the assumption was that specialized formatting requirements would be handled by specialized document formats, with markup pages acting as glue for listing and navigating between those formats (similar to how most browsers now have built-in PDF readers).

I keep reading this but can't quite parse it. What do you mean by "Hyperlinks are now the navigation bar inside a website and little else"? Do you mean "URLs are shown in browser navigation bars but people do not click hyperlinks in websites"?

Meaning that the main viable use case for them now is intra-site navigation, i.e. the menu bar at the top of the page.

So the observation here is that Tim Berners Lee's original vision was all these documents that would be linking to each other, across different hosts. But today's websites are mostly silos that only link inwards. Have I got that right?

In the paar online text would be filled with more links and references. Wikipedia is still like that.

The normal use case are navigation, and call to action.

The web has become a kiosk with virtual magazines screaming for attention Commented with an application distribution platform (html/js)

We used to have applications and protocols. Now we have something similar to a mainframe, but the client app is distributed over and over again.

Forum? NNTP

Chat? IRC

Dole transfer? FTP

Status updates? Finger

IMO Google has been slowly condensing/removing the address bar in Chrome so people think Google Search == web, and I think your anecdote shows that it's working.

> I've been trained to _not_ click links in a page

You don’t click links on the Google results page?

I wish google had clean links on their result page, so I could right-click and copy URL cleanly. But no, it is a tracker link

Yeah, that’s annoying, but there’s browser extensions like ClearURLs to care of that.

Thanks that's a good tip, seems to be a good addon for firefox. Annoyingly looks like that addon also has some scope creep (default domain blocking, why, I have ad blockers for that?)

Another part of the training I'm talking about. You need an add-on to get basic functionality from the 90s back.

Replying to say that I just noticed this today, and decided it was a negative tendency. I was reading a history article on The Athletic and was wondering about some things. Only after mulling a bit, I noticed they were links to some good youtube videos.

What?

Also the primary input to Google PageRank.

Page rank hasn't been used as the google algorithm for over 15 years now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com