Brian Butterworth
Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:58:05 -0700
John, Before I start, I hope you recognise the "you're going it wrong" in the subject from http://icanhascheezburger.com/tag/wrong/ I've been having a think about how Wikipedia uses in line links. It's probably the most consistent in-line hypertext linked site I can think of, and it has rather good, if a little hard to discover rules about them. 1) There are the links to articles in the 'pedia. The rules for these are that the first occurrence of a linkable item is linked to the article. The link text must link to an object that is clearly the same. For example, you link "Gordon Brown" to the article about "Gordon Brown", not to "Prime Minister". IMHO, as you now have http://www.bbc.co.uk/topics/ you should first run though all the published pages and make all the internal links you can to the first occurrence of anything that links to a topic. As with Wikipedia, these type of links are just the old "underlined text" type and don't have an icon as they don't take you off site. 2) The second type of link you use in Wikipedia is the reference type. When editing a page you must, by the Wikipedia rules, use the <ref> tag to indicate the source for some information. For the BBC News (indeed all BBC) site, the BBC is usually the "primary source". And this is the way it should be. IMHO, if the author of a BBC article has used information from another source, then you should do the same as Wikipedia, and indicate the external Internet source using a superscript clickable reference link that takes you to a list of references at the bottom of the page. Say, for example, that you have used information from a press release from a third party online, it would be great for the confidence in BBC journalism to show that this is the case. The references are very subtle and don't disturb the flow of the page. Wikipedia has a rather nifty format for doing these types of links, which uses this format: {{cite web|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/topics/|title=BBC - Topics - Full list of topics|accessdate=2008-08-20}} This provides not just the URL, but the correct title and also the date the link was last checked. 3) The third type is the sort you are trying to do with the demo system. These are useful links to information that you can't or won't copy to your site. These, on Wikipedia, however are "editorial", rather than the way you are trying to do them which is "incidental". Sometimes it is fine to just use the link to the site, video, page etc without need for explanation, as you may do to Wikipedia if there is no BBC topic. So, for example if you don't have a topic page about "NATO", then the wikipedia favion and a link to the Wikipedia NATO page is quite logical. You might do this also if you link directly to say "Brighton and Hove Council" or something that's quite logical. On the other hand, if you link to a video on YouTube that relates to something, IMHO you should make the text of the page say that's what the video is rather than just underlining something that's close. ... The other thing, of course, that Wikipedia does is it allows people to add links in, and to correct them if there are errors. Obviously this is never going to happen on the BBC News site. But you do need a way of allowing visitors to suggest links and suggest corrections. You're going to need some great Javascript to do this nicely, and have to employ someone to check them all out. Some BBC News pages get a million hits or more, so even if 1% of people make suggestions that might be 1,000 suggestions a page. But you should allow links to "the same story in another media" so another view of the story can be suggested on newspaper and even other broadcasters sites. IMHO, in the "link economy" this would make the BBC better trusted and first visited. 2008/8/19 John O'Donovan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I think we will take note that perhaps the links are perhaps a little too > small :o) > > Thanks for all the feedback so far. > > Cheers, > > jod > > ------------------------------ > *From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of D P Ingram > *Sent:* Tue 8/19/2008 18:29 > *To:* backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk > *Subject:* Re: [backstage] Inline hypertext links - you're doing it wrong! > > I must be going blinder than I already am (partially sighted) as with OS X > and Safari I didn't see the little icons either. > Darren > ¦ D P Ingram ¦ Ab Ingram Oy ¦ extn 8001 > ¦ darren @ ingram.fi ¦ www.ingram.fi ¦ > ¦ > ¦ +358 6 781 0275 (FIN) ¦ +46 8 5511 4995 (SWE) ¦ +44 203 014 3839 (UK) ¦ > ¦ > > > > > > > > > > -- Brian Butterworth http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and switchover advice, since 2002