Contextual Links Labels

Labels as Contextual Links Labels describe the hypertext links within the body of a document or chunk of information, and naturally occur within the descriptive context of their surrounding text. Contextual links are easy to create and are the basis for the exciting interconnectedness that drives much of the Web’s success.

However, just because contextual links are relatively easy to create doesn’t mean they necessarily work well. In fact, ease of creation introduces problems. Contextual links are generally not developed systematically; instead, they are developed in an ad hoc manner when the author makes a connection between her text and some‐ thing else, and encodes that association in her document. These hypertext connections are therefore more heterogeneous and per‐ sonal than, say, the connections between items in a hierarchy, where links are understood to be connecting parent items and child items. The result is that contextual link labels mean different things to dif‐ ferent people. You see the link “Shakespeare” and, upon clicking it, expect to be taken to the Bard’s biography. I, on the other hand, expect to be taken to his Wikipedia entry. In fact, the link actually takes us to a page for the village of Shakespeare, New Mexico. Go figure…