Saturday, February 07, 2004

Hyperlink Technology

Working with blogger, it's become apparent to me the limits of linking. For example, say I want to link to some news blogging sites. I write "If you want to check out some more news sites, click here." Unfortunately, "here" only takes you to one site. Now, that site could be a compilation of links to news blogging sites, but often such a linking site doesn't exist for my subject or doesn't include all of the sites I want to link to. Often I'd just be better off listing the different sites in the text of my post and linking to them individually, taking up a lot of screen space, which the reader is forced to sift through even if they weren't interested in the link in the first place.

This seems to me a flaw, or at least a place for much improvement, in internet technology. I'd like to see a technology in which passing the cursor over a link spawns a small, semi-transparent window with multiple links, short descriptions of them, or even portions of the site to which they are linking. That way you could link by subject-matter, rather than by site, while getting a preview of what you might experience if you were to click. More information would pass to the interested reader more quickly and efficiently, while freeing up text space for those not interested in the link.

Just a thought.

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