HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6-6. Kinder, gentler inline links work best
A quick scan of
Figure 6-6
immediately yields useful links to "kumquat
farming methods" and "kumquat industry's past ten years." There is no
need to read the surrounding text to understand where the link will take
you. Indeed, the immediately surrounding content in our example, as
for most inline links, serves only as syntactic sugar in support of the
embedded links.
Embedding links into the general discourse of a document takes more
effort than creating link lists. You have to actually understand the con-
tent of the current document as well as the target documents, be able
to express that relationship in just a few words, and then intelligently
incorporate that link at some key place in the source document. Hope-
fully this key place is where you might expect the user to be ready to
interrupt her reading and ask a question or request more information.
To make matters even more difficult, particularly for the traditional tech
writer, this form of author-reader conversation is most effective when
presented in active voice (he, she, or it does something to an object
versus the object having something done to it). The effort expended is
worthwhile, resulting in more informative, easily read documents. Re-
member, you'll write the document once, but it will be read thousands,
if not millions, of times. Please your readers, please.
