Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are those nifty bits of text or graphics (or whatever, really) that let you jump from page to page, document to document at your will. Hypertext and hyperlinks make the web go around.

First, let me say that hypertext is brilliant -- it's having all those "see also" references in your encylopedias and dictionaries actually bring you right to the suggested page. It's what makes "surfing" possible. You can get lost in a series of links that take you eight sites and ten topics away from where you started.

What's great about hypertext is about how people use it. Some folks will link only to documents in their own site, illuminating their importance and expertise in a certain field. Say, for example, that I was discussing pizza here. Why, I might be so bold as to not refer you to Wikipedia's history of pizza or even, for that matter to Pizza Hut.Rather, I might choose to send you to my own discourse on pizza. And why not? Nobody else has anything to say about pizza that's better than my comments, and I have no interest and nothing to gain by referring my readers to a site other than mine. Let's increase our clicks and pageloads and keep everyone bouncing around right here. Besides, if anybody else knew more about pizza than me, I wouldn't have to write about it in the first place.

Hyperlinks often bring you somewhere you wouldn't expect, such as a pornographic web site, or the web-site of an addle-minded, short-sighted misanthrope with a 9th-grade education. You never know where you're going to end up -- and that's the beauty of it all.

Many a dissertation could be written about hypertext and hyperlinks, their impact on the way we learn, how we access information and hundreds of other topics, but this is not the time nor the place, especially when this entry was inspired by somebody who was just trying to say they were sorry.

Hypertext quote:

• “[Even the Chicago Police are impressed with the result.] We think it's great, ... It's very innovative, taking data that we're already publishing on our crime site, which has been up since late 2000. By repackaging that information, presenting it in a highly interactive way with hyperlinks all over the place, it is easy to explore and to drill up and down in the data. It does some creative things with mapping.” -- Jonathan Lewis