An HTML link can be a connection to any sort of information. The link can be to another HTML page, it can be to a document, to a piece of music, or to anything than can be digitally encoded. The reader who clicks on a link can usually tell, by the address embedded in the link where it will lead him, though from my experience most readers are either unaware of the fact that they can do this, or simply don't exercise this ability. The type of information the link refers to should be considered an important aspect of link-ology. Another, no less important, aspect is the relative site on which the linked to information resides. It can be offsite - an entirely different web site, or onsite - within the same basic site. (The main contents page of the Boidem has, for instance, and for obvious reasons, only onsite links.) Additionally, it can even be "on-page", meaning that it is an internal link to a different part of the page the reader is presently reading, and will jump the reader to a different spot on that same page. The Boidem has made use of all of these possibilities.

The columns of the first year and a half of the Boidem used both offsite and onsite links, but most of the onsite links, rather than referring to additional musings on my part were to examples of what was being described in the main text: copies of e-letters, or quotes from other texts. The basic hypertextual conception of the columns of that first year was basically "link out to additional sources of information", and the onsite links existed mostly because the information they held wasn't available via traditional, offsite, clicking. There were exceptions to this rule, but for the most part links sent the reader somewhere else for more information.

By the middle of the second year of columns both the number and the quality of links had undergone a slow but distinctly visible change. Offsite links, instead of being embedded in the text of the main column were frequently a generation removed - a link from the main page led to another page that, along with the links themselves, contained explanations on the information being linked to. In addition, more and more onsite links were to asides, to extended footnotes, that expanded the topic being discussed in the main page, or (as was to become more and more the case) related my own experiences connected to that topic.

Also by about the middle of the second year I had almost completely stopped linking to outside material by making the URL itself into a link. This was rather prevalent at the beginning of the Boidem, but wasn't, to my mind, a fitting use of hypertext. Instead I always tried to place a link on words or phrases that were an integral part of the text.

Another aspect of the Boidem's links materialized perhaps half way into the third year of columns. Numerous offsite links started appearing that rather than sending the reader to an article or web site that expanded on, or related to, the topic under discussion, simply exercised the possibilities of hypertext by linking to the words to a song, or a recording of a song, that was alluded to in the text. I would grow to call this "name dropping" and it was used to link to material on a significant person who may have been referred to passingly in the main text.

On-page links are rare in the Boidem. On the whole I think that a web page should be a coherent whole, and if you have to (or want to) link to additional material, that's a sign that the material should be on a separate page. What's more, they tend to be disorienting to readers who assume that each link is to an independent page. Links back to the main page of a column from its numerous asides are, however, anchored to the start of the paragraph from which the aside was originally linked. This anchoring came into use around the start of the second year of columns. It helps avoid confusion, since by bringing the reader back to the paragraph from which he or she clicked there's no need to scroll through the text again.

Go to: A bit of Boidem chronology, or
Go to: Staking yet another middle ground, or
Go to: What a difference a da... makes, or
Go to: Trying to make some sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium