Once the Web was a thriving ecosystem of happily evolving, beautiful creatures. Like with any environment, sooner or later man will step in and kill a lot of things – actively or by accident – and diminish the diversity and health of said ecosystem.

In this series we will look at some of the strange animals that make up the Web as we know it, re-introduce them and show how you can do your part to make sure they don’t die out.

We start with the most important part of the Web: the Link.

A Link is what makes the web, well, the web. It is an address where you can access a certain resource. This could be an HTML document (another animal we’ll cover soon), a video, an image, a text file, a server-side script that does things like sending an email – anything really.

In order to make links work two things are needed: a working end point where the Link should point to (URL or URI – for the difference meet a few people who have too much time and not enough social interactions in their lives and discuss) and an interaction that makes a user agent try to fetch the Link. That could be a user typing the URL in an address bar of a browser, a cURL request on a command line or an HTML element pointing to the URL.

Links are kind of magical, insofar that they allow anyone to have a voice and be found. Check Paul Neave’s “Why I create for the web” to read a heartfelt ode to the Link. And it is true; once you managed to publish something at a URL all kind of wonderful things can happen:

• People can go there directly
• Search engines can index it so people can find it searching for similar terms
• Consumers can get the content you published without having to identify themselves and enter their credit card details (like they have to in almost any App Marketplace)
• Consumers can keep the URL for later and share it with others, thus advertising for you without being paid for it
• And much more…

It is the most simple and most effective world-wide, open and free publishing mechanism. That it is why we need to protect them from extinction.

In HTML, the absolutely best animal to use to make it easy for someone to access a URL is an anchor element or A. But of course there are other elements – in essence anything with an href or src attribute is a link out to the Web.

Endangering the interaction part

There are may ways people kill or endanger Links these days. The biggest one is people not using real links and yet expect Web interaction to happen. You can see anchor elements with href attributes of “javascript:void(0)” or “#” and script functionality applied to them (using event handling) to make them load content from the web or point to another resource. Ajax was the big new shiny thing there that made this the practice du jour and so much better than that awful loading of whole documents.

This is not the Web and it will hurt you. In essence these people do something very simple very wrong and then try to cover their tracks by still using anchor elements. Of course you can glue wings on a dog, but you shouldn’t expect it to be able to fly without a lot of assistance afterwards. There is no need for not pointing your anchors to a real, existing URL. If you do that, anything can go wrong and your functionality will still be OK - the person who activated the link will still get to the resource. Of course, that only works if that resource exists where you point to, which does lead to the second problem we have with Links these days.

Cool URLs don’t mutate

The practice of creating script-dependent links has also lead to another mutation of the link which turned out to be a terrible idea: the hashbang URL. This Frankenstein URL used fragment identifiers acting as Web resources, which they are not (try to do a meta refresh to a fragment if you doubt me). Luckily for us, we have the history API in browsers now which means we don’t need to rely on hashbang URLs for single page applications and we can very much redirect real, valid URLs on the server to their intended resource.

The second, big player in the endangerment of the Link is them dying or mutating. One of the traditional ways of dealing with Links to make them happy is to herd them in enclosures like “bookmarks” or “blog posts” or “articles” where you can group them with like-minded Links and even feed them with “tags” and “descriptions”, yummy things Links really love to chew on. Especially the “description” helps a lot – imagine giving a user a hint of what the anchor they click on will take them to. Sounds good, doesn’t it? People would only call those Links they want to play with and not make them run around without really caring for them.

Catch me if you can?

Talking about running around: social media is killing a lot of Links these days using an evil practice called “shortlinking”. Instead of sending the real URL to people to click on or remember we give them a much shorter version, which – though probably easier to remember – is flaky at best.

Every jump from URL to URL until we reach the endpoint we actually wanted to go to is slowing down our web interactions and is a possible point of failure. Try surfing the web on a slow connection that struggles with DNS lookups and you see what I mean.

Instead of herding the real Links and feeding them descriptions and tags we add hashtags to a URL that might or might not redirect to another. Bookmarks, emails and messages do not contain the real endpoint, but one pointing to it, possibly via another one. It is a big game of Chinese Whispers on a DNS lookup and HTTP redirect level.

In essence, there is a lot of hopping around the web happening that doesn’t benefit anyone – neither the end user who clicked on a link nor the maintainer or the resource as their referrers get all messed up. Twitter does not count the full length of the URL any longer but only uses 19 characters for any URL in a tweet (as it uses a t.co redirect under the hood to filter malicious links) thus using URL shorteners in Tweets is a pointless extra.

How can you help to save the Links?

Ensuring the survival of the Link is pretty easy, all you need to do is treat it with respect and make sure it can be found online rather than being disguised behind lots of mock-Links and relying on a special habitat like the flawless execution of scripts.

• If what you put inside a href attribute doesn’t do anything when you copy and paste it into a browser URL field, you’ve killed a Link
• If you post a URL that only redirects to another URL to save some characters, you killed a Link

You can do some very simple steps to ensure the survival of Links though:

• If you read a short article talking about a resource that has a “/via” link, follow all the “via”s and then post the final, real resource in your social media channels (I covered this some time ago in “That /via nonsense (and putting text in images)“)
• Tell everybody about server-side redirects, the history API and that hashbangs will not bring them any joy but are a very short-lived hack
• Do not use social media sharing buttons. Copy and paste the URL instead. A lot of these add yet another shorturl for tracking purposes (btw, you can use the one here, it uses the real URL - damn you almost got to say “isn’t it ironic, that…” and no, it isn’t)
• Read up on what humble elements like A, META and LINK can do
• If you want to interact with scripts and never ever point to a URL, use a BUTTON element – or create the anchor using JavaScript to prevent it from ever showing up when it can’t be used.

Please help us let the Links stay alive and frolic in the wild. It is beautiful sight to behold.

http://christianheilmann.com/2014/01/05/endangered-species-of-the-web-the-link/