Product Code Database
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to data by a user's clicking or touchscreen. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is known as anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink (or simply to link). A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext.
The document containing a hyperlink is known as its source document. For example, in content from Wikipedia or Google Search, many words and terms in the text are hyperlinked to definitions of those terms. Hyperlinks are often used to implement reference mechanisms such as tables of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes, and glossaries.
In some hypertext, hyperlinks can be bidirectional: they can be followed in two directions, so both ends act as anchors and as targets. More complex arrangements exist, such as many-to-many links.
The effect of following a hyperlink may vary with the hypertext system and may sometimes depend on the link itself; for instance, on the World Wide Web most hyperlinks cause the target document to replace the document being displayed, but some are marked to cause the target document to open in a new window (or, perhaps, in a new tab). Another possibility is transclusion, for which the link target is a URI fragment that replaces the link anchor within the source document. Not only persons browsing the document may follow hyperlinks. These hyperlinks may also be followed automatically by programs. A program that traverses the hypertext, following each hyperlink and gathering all the retrieved documents is known as a Web spider or Web crawler.
An inline link may display a modified version of the content; for instance, instead of an image, a thumbnail, Image resolution preview, cropped section, or magnification section may be shown. The full content is then usually available on demand, as is the case with print publishing software e.g., with an external link. This allows for smaller file sizes and quicker response to changes when the full linked content is not needed, as is the case when rearranging a page layout.
Fragments are marked with anchors (in any of various ways), which is why a link to a fragment is called an anchor link (that is, a link to an anchor). For example, in XML, the element <anchor id="name" />" provides anchoring capability (as long as the DTD or schema defines it), and in wiki markup, <nowiki></nowiki> is a typical example of implementing it. In word processor apps, anchors can be inserted where desired and may be called bookmarks. In URLs, the hash character (#) precedes the name of the anchor for the fragment.
One way to define a hot area in an image is by a list of coordinates that indicate its boundaries. For example, a political map of Africa may have each country hyperlinked to further information about that country. A separate invisible hot area interface allows for swapping skins or labels within the linked hot areas without repetitive embedding of links in the various skin elements.
Text hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into a word or a phrase and makes this text clickable.
Image hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into an image and makes this image clickable.
Bookmark hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into a text or an image and takes visitors to another part of a web page.
E-mail hyperlink. Hyperlink is embedded into e-mail address and allows visitors to send an e-mail message to this e-mail address.
This is what a hyperlink to the home page of the W3C organization could look like in HTML code:
This HTML code consists of several HTML element:
Webgraph is a graph, formed from as vertices and hyperlinks, as directed edges.
The scientific literature is a place where link persistence is crucial to the public knowledge. A 2013 study in BMC Bioinformatics analyzed 15,000 links in abstracts from Thomson Reuters' Web of Science citation index, founding that the median lifespan of Web pages was 9.3 years, and just 62% were archived. The median lifespan of a Web page constitutes high-degree variable, but its order of magnitude usually is of some months.
The most common destination anchor is a URL used in the World Wide Web. This can refer to a document, e.g. a webpage, or other resource, or to a position in a webpage. The latter is achieved by means of an HTML element with a "name" or "id" attribute at that position of the HTML document. The URL of the position is the URL of the webpage with a fragment identifier "# id attribute" appended.
When linking to PDF documents from an HTML page the " id attribute" can be replaced with syntax that references a page number or another element of the PDF, for example, "# page=386".
In a graphical user interface, the appearance of a mouse cursor may change into a hand motif to indicate a link. In most graphical web browsers, links are displayed in underlined blue text when they have not been visited, but underlined purple text when they have. When the user activates the link (e.g., by clicking on it with the Computer mouse) the browser displays the link's target. If the target is not an HTML file, depending on the file type and on the browser and its plugins, another program may be activated to open the file.
The HTML code contains some or all of the five main characteristics of a link:
It uses the HTML anchor with the attribute "href" (HREF is an abbreviation for "Hypertext REFerence") and optionally also the attributes "title", "target", and "class" or "id":
To embed a link into a web page, blogpost, or comment, it may take this form:
In a typical web browser, this would display as the underlined word "Example" in blue, which when clicked would take the user to the example.com website. This contributes to a clean, easy to read text or document.
By default, browsers will usually display hyperlinks as such:
When the cursor hovers over a link, depending on the browser and graphical user interface, some informative text about the link can be shown, popping up, not in a regular window, but in a special Mouse hover, which disappears when the cursor is moved away (sometimes it disappears anyway after a few seconds, and reappears when the cursor is moved away and back). Mozilla Firefox, IE, Opera, and many other web browsers all show the URL. In addition, the URL is commonly shown in the status bar.
Normally, a link opens in the current frame or window, but sites that use frames and multiple windows for navigation can add a special "target" attribute to specify where the link loads. If no window exists with that name, a new window is created with the ID, which can be used to refer to the window later in the browsing session.
Creation of new windows is probably the most common use of the "target" attribute. To prevent accidental reuse of a window, the special window names "_blank" and "_new" are usually available, and always cause a new window to be created. It is especially common to see this type of link when one large website links to an external page. The intention in that case is to ensure that the person browsing is aware that there is no endorsement of the site being linked to by the site that was linked from. However, the attribute is sometimes overused and can sometimes cause many windows to be created even while browsing a single site.
Another special page name is "_top", which causes any frames in the current window to be cleared away so that browsing can continue in the full window.
In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical proprietary worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Though Nelson's Xanadu Corporation was eventually funded by Autodesk in the 1980s, it never created this proprietary public-access network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968), with NLS. Ben Shneiderman working with graduate student Dan Ostroff designed and implemented the highlighted link in the HyperTIES system in 1983. HyperTIES was used to produce the world's first electronic journal, the July 1988 Communications of the ACM, which was cited as the source for the link concept in Tim Berners-Lee's Spring 1989 manifesto for the Web. In 1988, Ben Shneiderman and Greg Kearsley used HyperTIES to publish "Hypertext Hands-On!", the world's first electronic book.
Released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh, the database program HyperCard allowed for hyperlinking between various pages within a document, as well as to other documents and separate applications on the same computer. In 1990, Windows Help, which was introduced with Microsoft Windows 3.0, had widespread use of hyperlinks to link different pages in a single Online help together; in addition, it had a visually different kind of hyperlink that caused a popup help message to appear when clicked, usually to give definitions of terms introduced on the help page. The first widely used open protocol that included hyperlinks from any Internet site to any other Internet site was the Gopher protocol from 1991. It was soon eclipsed by HTML after the 1993 release of the Mosaic browser (which could handle Gopher links as well as HTML links). HTML's advantage was the ability to mix graphics, text, and hyperlinks, unlike Gopher, which just had menu-structured text and hyperlinks.
Contentious in particular are deep linking, which do not point to a site's home page or other entry point designated by the site owner, but to content elsewhere, allowing the user to bypass the site's own designated flow, and inline links, which incorporate the content in question into the pages of the linking site, making it seem part of the linking site's own content unless an explicit attribution is added.See Arriba Soft case. The Ninth Circuit decision in this case is the first important decision of a US court on linking. In it, the Ninth Circuit held the deep linking by Arriba Soft to images on Kelly's website to be legal under the fair use doctrine.
In certain , it is or has been held that hyperlinks are not merely or citations, but are devices for copying web pages. In the Netherlands, Karin Spaink was initially convicted in this way of copyright infringement by linking, although this ruling was overturned in 2003. The courts that advocate this view see the mere publication of a hyperlink that connects to illegal material to be an illegal act in itself, regardless of whether referencing illegal material is illegal. In 2004, Josephine Ho was acquitted of 'hyperlinks that corrupt traditional values' in Taiwan.
In 2000, British Telecom sued Prodigy, claiming that Prodigy infringed its patent () on web hyperlinks. After litigation, a court found for Prodigy, ruling that British Telecom's patent did not cover web hyperlinks.CNET News.com, Hyperlink patent case fails to click. August 23, 2002.
In United States jurisprudence, there is a distinction between the mere act of linking to someone else's website, and linking to content that is illegal (e.g., gambling illegal in the US) or infringing (e.g., illegal MP3 copies). Cybertelecom:: Legal to Link? The Internet Archive. Retrieved June 11, 2012. Several courts have found that merely linking to someone else's website, even if by bypassing commercial advertising, is not copyright or trademark infringement, regardless of how much someone else might object.Ford Motor Company v. 2600 Enterprises, 177 F.Supp.2d 661 (EDMi December 20, 2001)American Civil Liberties Union v. Miller, 977 F.Supp. 1228 (ND Ga. 1997)Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.Com, Inc., No. 99-07654 (CD Calif. March 27, 2000) Linking to illegal or infringing content can be sufficiently problematic to give rise to legal liability. Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, Inc. , 75 FSupp2d 1290 (D Utah 1999)Universal City Studios Inc v Reimerdes, 111 FSupp2d 294 (DCNY 2000) Comcast of Illinois X LLC v. Hightech Elec. Inc. , District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Decision of July 28, 2004, 03 C 3231 Compare Perfect 10 v. Google , Decision of February 21, 2006, Case No. CV 04-9484 AHM (CD Cal. 2/21/06), CRI 2006, 76–88 No liability for thumbnail links to infringing content for a summary of the current status of US copyright law as to hyperlinking, see the discussion regarding the Arriba Soft and Perfect 10 cases.
Somewhat controversially, Vuestar Technologies has tried to enforce applied for by its owner, Ronald Neville Langford, TelecomTV – TelecomTV One – News around the world relating to search techniques using hyperlinked images to other websites or web pages. All your Interwibble is belong to us, Silvie Barak, The Inquirer, 21 February 2009
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