Caffeinate Your Hypertext

Caffeine

The hyperlink is the most basic, most powerful part of the Web.

Vannevar Bush, who also directed the US Atomic Bomb project, proposed the hyperlink in 1945. He hoped for a system that would allow researchers to collaborate on a single, central knowledgebase of all known information about anything. In Vannevar's proposed Memex, the links aren't in the documents themselves. In fact, Vannevar's hypertext worked more like a history list. His ideas inspired later programmers who then made the hyperlink into what it is today. Later still, Tim Berners-Lee combined existing hypertext ideas with the Internet to create the World Wide Web.

What's In A Link?

So what? Everybody knows what a hyperlink is.

That's the problem. When I first learned HTML, I wasn't concerned about my documents themselves. I wanted to learn to write good HTML. I worried about different browsers displaying pages differently. I salivated over new technologies. After all, I'd been a Web user for years; I knew what links were. I was more interested in the pixel width of a paragraph than what it said or how it fit within my site.

I never thought about my entire site as one big, connected document. Rather, I thought of it as a number of individual, connected pages. My sites were islands with airports instead of a single continent. I rarely strategized about creative ways to connect my content. I went by what I saw everywhere else: make a toolbar and link it to a hierarchy.

Note: Not sure how to create HTML code? If you use a WYSIWYG editor like Netscape or Dreamweaver, keep reading. Otherwise, you might want to check out SitePoint's Beginners' HTML.

Even though I'd been designing for years, I hadn't seriously thought about the link. It was always just there. I did know that coming up with good links is hard. I just didn't realize all the nifty ways hypertext lets us put good links together. Some links are part of the sentence. Other links can be listed together in an index. Some people put hidden links on their Web pages. Sometimes, each pixel in an image is a different link. At the most basic level, however, links just connect information.

Just? Authors of the past would kill to write in hypertext. After I thought about links for a while, I got some painful flashbacks to elementary school as I realized that the link works like a part of grammar.

The Hyperlink's Place in Grammar

I know what you're thinking. Ole Nathan has finally gone over the edge. All those English classes made him go crazy. But think about it. When I was growing up, I learned a lot about nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I learned how to piece together sentences, paragraphs, and essays using different parts of speech. Punctuation and whitespace link words into sentences; hyperlinks piece together multiple pages in the same document.

While there are fewer rules for hypertext than for punctuation, there are similarities. Write a chapter with no punctuation and readers will find it hard to understand. Write a sentence with too much pu.-;nct!ua)t.ion, and everyone will find it hard to read. Write hypertext with too many or too few links and pages, and it will fall short as well.

Page Organization

Connecting pages with hyperlinks organizes the information the pages connect. Most people think of complicated webs when they think of hypertext, but most sites don't look like webs at all. One part of the page contains an index, and a seperate part of the page displays the site content. On the SitePoint Website, you'll notice a simple index along the top, left, bottom, and right.

Simplified? Yes. While the SitePoint navigation bars might look very complex, they only link to a small number of the total pages. With so many articles, it would be impractical to list every possible page down the side. Many of the links along the top and sides link to further indexes of articles and forums. This hierarchy allows SitePoint to neatly organize and categorize content.

Let's look at some more examples of Website organization to see what we can learn about designing our own sites.