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As We May Think - And LinkFor centuries now, the world has contained more information than our minds can process and store. In 1945, with the Second World War drawing to a close, this dilemma spurred the Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, to write an Atlantic Monthly article called "As We May Think". In this article, listed below, Bush described the "memex" - the basic model for today's World Wide Web, tied together by countless billions of invisible electronic threads. A Bush disciple, Ted Nelson, coined the term hypertext in the 1960s, and the threads became hyperlinks - and later, just plain links. These days, just minutes of work and some free software lets you create a web page full of links. Connection OverloadBut just because Web page creators can use hypertext doesn't mean we should use it unthinkingly. Vannevar Bush showed extraordinary vision, declaring that "the world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it". He imagined researchers and lawyers cataloguing references with a hypertext system. But the father of hypertext couldn't imagine the World Wide Web, where a site can have a hundred references to different pieces of material - where, taken to extremes, a site mostly devoted to paper plane design can refer obliquely to Alfred Hitchcock, Aboriginal artefacts, Albania and aardvarks, and link to them all. When you're trying to get a message across, too much choice can be worse than too little. The links of the World Wide Web create at least three potential problems. For a start, they're dumb; they contain little information. The context of the surrounding words, pictures and sounds may make it obvious that a blue, underlined, hyperlinked word leads to a particular site elsewhere on the Web. But in many cases - as any Web user knows - a link will leave it to the reader to guess what might be on the other end. Somehow or other, you should describe your links. (The Web magazine Feed once attempted to use marginal notes in the text to tell readers what sort of link they were clicking, but the results were not entirely successful.) Links can also distract. The Suck essay site just about gets away with dropping links into the text on every second line, but this element of Suck's peculiar charm won't work on most other sites. And worst of all, links also deter. Once your visitors click through a link to another site, they will probably have more than a dozen alternatives to pushing the "back" button and returning to your site. The answer's clear: unless your site is an absolute world-beater, restrict your links. But how? Four OptionsIf you're prepared for complication, you can design a site using frames and open new sites right there in your web pages. But frames are hard work, prevent page printing and can confuse the browsers that see them. On most sites, they have little to recommend them.Some sites go to the extreme of using links only to let visitors navigate between points on their site. Salon Magazine, among many others, often dispenses with links within its text. That won't work for everyone. A few Web designers, like PC Week columnist Jeff Frentzen, solves the problem in another worthwhile way: say what you want to say, then list your links with enough context to let viewers decide whether to visit or not. But David Siegel's brilliant High Five site demonstrates an even more elegant solution. High Five discusses and displays the Web's best design. Siegel is careful to open all his example sites in a new browser window - meaning you end up with one version of Navigator or Internet Explorer looking at the new page, and the original version of the browser still looking at what Siegel was saying in the first place. This may seem sneaky, but Siegel's site aims to teach, not to send viewers off on another endless Web-surfing session. (The effect is accomplished by adding one small but powerful line of code - Siegel's essay "The Balkanization of the Web" is one of the most important documents which Web site creators can get their hands on. Among many other topics, Siegel argues for "porous sites that have strategically placed external links". One section opens with a quote from Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay. Nevertheless, it goes easy on the links.
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Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"