http://norman.walsh.name/2007/02/17/onLinking 10 13 2007-02-17T12:44:18-05:00 $Date: 2007-02-17 13:56:59 -0500 (Sat, 17 Feb 2007) $ Norman Walsh 2007 Norman Walsh If you've got the metadata, use it: taking a run at link indirection. While I was getting caught up on on some background reading after our vacation, I read tbray's essay On Linking. I've often wanted multi-ended links too and, like Tim, I've invested some time in XLink hoping that it would help. I've also invested time in building a great big honking bag of metadata behind this site. As a consequence, it turns out to be fairly easy for me to make associations between things and pull out a set of related resources for many topics. Instead of waiting for the browser vendors to provide multi-ended linking There's a tangentially related essay to be written here about browser innovation and tag soup and XML but I'm going not going to go there now. or waiting until I have time to cook up some cross-platform JavaScript/Greasemonkey magic, I've decided to implement the simplest thing that could possibly work. [Link Group Icon] Those little “L” graphics that you see scattered throughout this essay, and will find in other essays as well, are links to a “link group” page that provides indirection for the topic that precedes them. (I'm not real happy with the way it looks in the case of possessives like “Tim's” above, so I may tinker with the presentation.) I'm not willing to do any more frying so, for the moment at least, the links are only going to be inserted in essays when I transform them to HTML. I can imagine a future where the links are generated on the client side using a little magic, but I haven't implemented it yet. Simple and easy, yes. Effective? You tell me.