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Yes, I am familiar with Mysti's presentation and with the DITArati's common (though not universal) anti-inline-linking stand. The anti-linking stand in DITA has a lot to do with the difficulties of managing inline links in reused content. DITA's link management mechanisms are curiously ill-suited to this task, which has led to many people using DITA turning against inline linking altogether.
But there is something deeper at work here: a persistence of document thinking, which is particularly evident in a couple of the cons you cite:
* Statistics show that users tend not to return to a page after they link away.
Well, why would we expect them to? Document thinking says that readers are supposed to read all the way to the end of the document so the document has somehow failed if people follow a link and don't come back. But this is ridiculous. It is like suggesting that a road should not have junctions because people make take a side road and not travel all the way to the end of the main road. Readers have an information destination and there is no reason to think that one document can (or should try) to take them from their precise and individual starting point all the way to their precise and individual end point.
* Statistics show that most links simply aren't clicked.
And drivers don't take most turns in a road. But some drivers take each of the turns, and the road network as a whole relies on all of those turns being available to take. (This is not to say that there are never unnecessary links, any more than that there are never unnecessary road junctions that lead nowhere. Often people link at random rather than having a consistent well thought out linking strategy.) Document thinking rears its head again here: every part of the document is supposed to be used by every reader. If a link is not clicked, the reader is not consuming the whole of the document.
But this idea that the reader is supposed to consume the whole document and nothing but the document is bonkers. It was always bonkers, but in the paper world, where getting from one document to another was relatively difficult, there was some justification for thinking and designing this way. But in a hypertext world you can get anywhere instantly. Hypertexts are nodes in a network and readers get what they need from a successful traversal of the network, not from the consumption of the whole of a single document.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Monique Semp
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2016 5:08 PM
To: TechWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject: inline links (Re: Online help access question)
> This second point should be elementary for all product documentation
> in the hypertext age. You should never, ever, mention a system
> function or procedure without linking to that procedure.
I whole-heartedly agree, and yet there are many admonishments for people writing in DITA to eschew links in the content. So I now include links only sparingly, but I do still include them. I just try to decide that there's a real potential benefit instead of just automatically linking to somewhat related info.
(And yes, here meant to say "DITA", not "structured authoring", because although this point is relevant to *any* writingâboth structured and "unstructured", I've encountered anti-link vehemence only when reading/hearing about DITA-specific authoring or when being edited while working in a DITA ecosystem. But of course, the argument about including links is relevant regardless of authoring/publishing system.)
There's a slideshare from 2013 that really made the rounds a few years ago in the San Francisco writing community, "Herding Tigers: Letting Go of Inline Links", http://www.slideshare.net/MystiBerry/herding-tigers.
It was timely because I'd been working in DITA in an organization that
(gasp!) had a great editing team, which was when I was first "subjected" to the "no link" rule. That was the style, and so of course I had to acquiesce.
But separate from that, I had a great written exchange with this slideshare's author.
The major points, pro (include links) and con (exclude them), boiled down
to:
Con (exclude links):
* It's a crutch that soothes the writer and wastes time (especially to maintain the links).
* Statistics show that users tend not to return to a page after they link away.
* Statistics show that most links simply aren't clicked.
Pro (include links):
* Supertasks (a task where each step is itself a complex task) benefit from links; otherwise users have to search.
* Doc reviewers *always* want links. (No, doc reviewers don't always know best. But especially if you're a consultant, you must keep the team relatively happy.)
* They "just feel right".
-Monique
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