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I agree about the importance of links. In fact, when I come across an article about something that many others have written about, and it has no links or refere

• blitz_skull 4y ago
  Why is it rude to open a new tab? I truly hate when I’m trying to view a link and it navigates me away from what I’m reading. IMO new tabs should always be the default.
  • nunuvit 4y ago
    It overrides the user's browser settings. As a user, technically you can override the override, but it's only accessible sometimes through hidden settings or user scripts.
  • circuit10 4y ago
    I don’t mind new tabs but what really annoys me is when things are set to open in a new window, and you have to fiddle with it to get it to merge back into the window you already have open
    • circuit10 4y ago
      I’m surprised that someone downvoted this, I thought this would be very uncontroversial. Is there someone who actually likes this for some reason?
      • dalmo3 4y ago
        I didn't downvote, but links opening a new browser window, except for the occasional auth pop-up, hasn't been a thing since... 2008? What browser still doesn't use tabs by default?
        • circuit10 4y ago
          Websites can override the setting and force browsers to do it, and quite a lot of them seem to for some reason
    • twic 4y ago
      Browsers could do two little things. Firstly, when mousing over a link which will open in a new tab, show a different pointer. I get a hand with the index finger extended when hovering over a normal link; it could be that but with a diagonal arrow, like the common "open in new window" badge, for a link which opens in a new tab. Secondly, in the context menu for a link which will open in a new tab, replace the "open link in new tab" option with "open link in this tab". As long as links are real links, and not JavaScript devilry, this would 85% fix it for me.
  • leephillips 4y ago
    The reader should decide. It’s usually trivial to hold down a modifier key to open a link in a new tab or window, but if the `target` attribute is set in the link it’s not as easy to override it. This debate raged in the early days of the web: what is the better practice? A consensus emerged among web designers that leaving it to the reader makes more sense. I’m proud that I convinced J. Zeldman that his early practice of using `target='_blank'` hurt the user’s navigation, and so played a minuscule part in nudging designers in general away from this.
    • zo1 4y ago
      Unfortunately, with the advent of SPAs, Web3.0 and the takeover of the web by Angular and friends, we can no longer rely on "links" behaving that way. For the time-being, we've lost that battle and the web is worse-off as a result. I.e. A lot of the time, links are actually various DOM elements that have onclick handlers and various JS-fuckery meant to obfuscate true behavior from the user and make it more difficult for the user to control the browser. Worse still, how about the user-hostile behavior of browsers that now allow JS to takeover and disable right-click, select and copy functions.
      • ElectricalUnion 4y ago
        Worse than that, even if you somehow try to force onclick handlers to not obfuscate true behavior, most truly bad SPAs don't even have valid intermediary states accessible thru URLs; the only way to navigate the "application" is sometimes by changing the state with interactive SPA use.
      • cratermoon 4y ago
        Yes, deep-linking with SPAs is mostly broken. This came up here a few weeks ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896472) Someone defended SPAs by pointing out that frameworks like React use Javascript and browser APIs to fake paths and history, and another noted that reimplementing basic browser functionality was madness.
  • kroltan 4y ago
    Middle mouse button (or control+click) in any browser opens a new tab (as long as you're using actual links, don't get me started on the morons who think "span with a onclick handler" is an acceptable substitute) Forcing to open on a new tab breaks conventional behaviour, it should be left as the user's decision (either explicit every time, or a setting in their browser. This setting already exists btw, if you like more tabs you can enable it in your browser). (Maybe a case could be made if the website is actually an application and there would be data loss if not for the new tab, but I would argue design your application so as data loss is not possible in that case) --- As for myself, the browsing history is something very useful to have, I like keeping the amount of tabs down to near one per activity, so I regularly use the history to go back to what I was reading before. Forcing new tabs means I have to reach for more advanced tools like tab trees, which are often not worth the cognitive effort.
    • Phurist 4y ago
      [flagged]
  • kevincox 4y ago
    People have different preferences. Personally I have set `browser.link.open_newwindow = 1` in Firefox to force all links to open in the same tab, then I can middle-click to open in a new tab. This way I can do what I want without worrying about what the website author thinks I wanted. It does have some downsides though. Some sites don't use <a> tags but instead <div> with JS to open the link, then you can't choose to open in a new tab (on the other hand they can't force you to open a new tab so it is sort of even on average). Some sites break because they are trying to launch a new window that communicates with the parent. But overall I think it is a big improvement to the web.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    Because if the link is a normal one, the user can choose whether to open it in same tab (regular click) or a new tab (lots of UX shortcuts for this like Ctrl+click). But if the link is hardcoded as a new tab, the user has no choice. There's no way to open a new-tab link in the same tab. :( Not to mention that there's generally zero indication it's a new-tab link anyways, so not only does it take away choice, but it does so non-predictably. Ugh.
• wizzwizz4 4y ago
  > Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise. I sometimes link to the Wikipedia article when there are many things by a certain term, or when I'm using terminology that doesn't show up in search results (but is common in colloquial use). Should I do this a different way?
  • leephillips 4y ago
    You’re using links to disambiguate your terms; it makes sense. My unpopular opinion would be to keep linking as you’re doing, but find better sources than wikipedia. Something reliable and, if possible, authoritative, and that’s more likely to have stable content—where you can be a bit more sure that what your readers will see when they follow the link is what you saw.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• animaomnium 4y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to read the post and write a thoughtful reply. You make a good point: it is hard to find good links. These links suck. I apologize for this poor first-order approximation: I want to link to stuff interesting enough to merit a post or two in their own right. To that end, I keep a list of every interesting thing that I read. I plan to index that list, and make it searchable. Reliance on a search engine is a stop-gap to keep scope sensible at this point. There's nothing stopping other people from taking this idea and running with it. Given your personal involvement in this area, I understand your apprehension. Like you, I want to see a denser, more interesting web. But without tools to overcome the static friction of linking things together, I don't think we'll see density and utility of links increase any more than it already has. That's what I hoped to highlight in this piece.
  • leephillips 4y ago
    Well, I appreciate that you’re thinking about the problem of linking in general and writing about it. If finding and inserting appropriate links is laborious—well, so is writing. Linking is part of the process—part of the content. You can’t automate it away. Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information management system, and this makes keeping track of sources and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and other products out there designed to help with this task.
    • joelfried 4y ago
      > Almost a pleasure, in fact Could you elaborate a bit on your workflow that makes it almost enjoyable? My personal workflow can always use an upgrade and I'd love to hear what works for you!
      • leephillips 4y ago
        Very briefly, it depends on Pandoc with citeproc, and vim (lately nvim) with the vim-markdown plugin, which adds hiding to citeproc links, making the text easier to read in the editor. Next I have bibliographic information on every source that I use stored in a postgres database. I have a collection of scripts (in lua, python, bash, ...) so I can do what I want within the editor: supply a URL and have some information scraped from the page and stored in a note, one file per resource, with bibliographic information in YAML blocks and anything else that I want to add. Another script stores the important information from the YAML blocks into the database. I have a script that builds a bibtex file from the citeproc links in my document, for formatting bibliographies in the final version. I can generate HTML, PDF, DOCX, or plain text from the same source. The pleasure comes from having a set of keyboard shortcuts that let me jump instantly from a citeproc tag to my notes file, a local copy of the resource, or the copy on the web; also to search for notes with keywords, and a few more things. I can select part of my text and hit two keys to transform it into plain text or HTML with properly formatted links and references. For each notes file corresponding to a resource another keyboard shortcut brings up the list of articles referring to it, and I have a script to draw a graphviz graph of this reference network. I’ve built this up over the years; it’s a mess and no one else should use it. Maybe I’ll clean it up some day. It’s really paying off now for me though: I’m writing a book with about 50 references for each chapter; it would be unmanageable without some kind of system. I know that there’s Zotero and other systems out there. But I prefer that this work in the peculiar way that I like; these systems tend to become brain extensions and are somewhat personal.
• horsawlarway 4y ago
  Yeah - I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found the sentiment behind this article, and the technical article itself, so very much at odds. - links aren’t dead: they’re vitally important. Links lend authority. [...] Don’t link to stuff you don’t trust, SEO or otherwise. - Linkoln normalizes the post, replacing each wikilink with the best corresponding hyperlink it could find on the web, using Google