Hyperlink

web devprogramming

A reference from one document to another that a reader can follow directly, and the mechanism the web is built on.

The idea predates the web by decades and the web's contribution was to make it one-directional and allowed to break. Earlier hypertext systems tried to guarantee that every link resolved, which requires central coordination and does not scale past one organisation. Berners-Lee's design permits a link to point at something that has moved or vanished, and accepts the resulting rot as the price of letting anyone publish without asking permission. Almost every subsequent argument about the web - link rot, deep linking, whether a site may forbid inbound links, what a URL is allowed to reveal - descends from that one decision to let links fail.

Also known as: link, anchor, href

← All glossary entries