Use Embedded Links with Caution

You know how sometimes you're reading a Web page and the links start coming at you? You don't know why they're there or where they're going, and you probably won't follow them. Welcome to the wonderful world of embedded links.

Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville call this phenomenon "ad hoc navigation." Ad hoc navigation is risky, since overdoing it results in a mess like the one in the preceding paragraph.

Morville and Rosenfeld advise thinking twice about using embedded links to link to anything important. People read less carefully on the Web, and it's easy to miss an embedded link when you're skimming a page. You can avoid confusion by putting important ad hoc links on separate lines within a paragraph, or by gathering all the ad hoc links into a menu or a bulleted list elsewhere in the document.

On the other hand, if the link is a diversion, not a necessity, then embedded links "can be an elegant, unobtrusive solution," according to Rosenfeld and Morville. The appropriateness of embedded links is often an editorial decision relating to how well the text flows with and without them.

One Word: Context

If you use embedded links, give some context. For example, imagine encountering the following sentence on a Web page:

I'm writing a screenplay in my spare time.

Where's that link going to go? To a copy of the work-in-progress? A Web page about screenwriting? You could look down at the bottom of the browser window for clues. If you see news:misc.writing.screenplays when you mouse over the link, the mystery is solved. However, the status bar rarely provides such obvious context, and you shouldn't expect users to rely on it. Context is always helpful, like in the following examples:

I'm writing a screenplay in my spare time. Want to read it?

I'm writing a screenplay in my spare time, so I hang out at misc.writing.screenplays.

I'm writing a screenplay in my spare time, and I've found this Web site quite helpful.

Name Your Embedded Links

If you don't want to provide explicit context, consider supplementing your ad hoc links with link titles. As explained in Jakob Nielsen's January 1998 article, Link Titles Help Users Predict Where They Are Going, a link title is a short explanation that pops up when the user mouses over a link.

Link titles are most useful when the link's destination is not obvious from the context (Unfortunately, as Chuck Musciano points out, link titles only work in Internet Explorer 4.0).

For instance, consider the first example on this page, our screenplay-writing friend. When you left your cursor over the phrase "writing a screenplay" for a moment, the link title such as "Read it!" would pop up for IE4 users. However, adding a link title to an explicit link such as "Want to read it?" would be excessive. Nielsen also suggests always retaining some context so the link can be somewhat understood without the title, and keeping the link title short.