Evolving the Link

This paper discusses the Web's most basic - though arguably the most powerful - feature: the hyperlink. When the Web appeared, many in the hypertext community criticized it because of its simplifications. For a start, links that break easily went against conventional wisdom. Broken links were, in fact, designed in as a Web feature. Somewhat counterintuitively, this has made the system as a whole significantly more robust. A Web that relied on everyone ensuring that something was always at the end of their links would be seriously brittle and hardly likely to survive long, given human nature. Critics also pointed to the limitations of links that pointed in only one direction and were untyped. The Web's success has to a large extent overridden these criticisms without really proving them wrong