On Linking

So here’s what I’d like: a way to write multi-ended links with simple indirection, and a reasonable way for users to display them in whatever browser they’re using.
Ongoing: On Linking

Tim BrayTim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987-1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0…, who’s the person behind Ongoing and is currently at Sun Microsystems, talks about a weakness in reference links, pointing to their potential fragility. Even Wikipedia, he surmises, might not be here in some near future, so all of our links to it will simply fail. More, he says, it’s often not easy to figure out which source to link to — though linking to a number of sources would reduce the chances that link rot or institutional failure will destroy your reference.

What I want, then, is a link to a bunch of things at once. It turns out that there’s a perfectly good, if lightly-implemented, way to do this in XML, called XLink [Disclosure: I helped create it.]. It’s been lightly-implemented mostly I think because the browser writers just didn’t feel any particular pull for such a thing. This has struck me as a little odd because every financial Web site in the world is full of multi-ended links: every time they mention a company they’ll typically link to its share price, some analysis, and previous articles…

Bray goes on to say that even though browsers have chosen not to implement XLink, he may be able to invent a way for us to create multi-ended links thanks to AJAX and Greasemonkey (a Firefox plugin).

I have only a fuzzy sense of what he’s after, but anything that would 1). simplify linking to a bunch of parallel sources, and 2). increase the likelihood that my link will point to some surviving resource, seems like a good idea. I think of law’s parallel cites to judgments: wouldn’t it be handy to have the neutral citation, e.g., point somehow to all of the reports, online and off; and so forth. This is a notion that might be worth my following.