Who invented hyperlinks

It was a way for them to communicate and share data, via message or bulletin boards, and secure, end-to-end channels.

These were a precursor to the news sites and social media we use today, but not half as visually stimulating as the web we now know. The WWW sits on top of the internet. It is the system - the protocols and code - that allow computers to host web pages and link from one to another around the global network, the internet.

Both say he invented the web in His boss, Mike Sendall, called the proposal "vague but exciting," and I agree with that assessment, in that the concept would have been exciting but as vague as a twinkle in a parent-to-be's eye. A baby isn't born until it's born. Because only a freak would name their kid before it was born, right?

And the second is August 6, This is the day Sir Tim posted a memo on one of those old-skool message boards - alt. It marks the day the web was opened to the world. To me, this smells more like the kid's parents inviting all her aunts and uncles round to ogle the new heir for the first time. Yes, we thought of that. But Sir Tim, we were told, is currently on "annual leave" and unavailable for comment. So what else could we do? Check the web? Yes, thought of that too.

We went "online" and googled, binged, duck-ducked, and yahood And if you do the same, you may well find references to the Atlantic Cable of , Sputnik's launch in , or a article about a "Memex," which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche.

In , Thomas Merrill and Lawrence Roberts connected a TX-2 computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to a Q in California on a low speed dial-up telephone line to create the first wide-area computer network. It led to a move from "circuit switching" to packet switching, allowing the kind of data transfers we rely on today. These included electronic mail, and Roberts' first email utility program, which "was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of 'people-to-people' traffic," wrote the authors of "A Brief History of the Internet" in Later, in an interview with CNN, Gore said he had taken "the initiative in creating the internet," leading some to believe he had done just that.

This week the world wide web is 25 years old. In that time it has revolutionized our world. Links can correlate any text string with a URL, such that the user can instantly reach the target document by activating the link.

Links stand out from the surrounding text by being underlined and in blue text. Tap or click a link to activate it, or if you use a keyboard, press Tab until the link is in focus and hit Enter or Spacebar. Links are the breakthrough that made the Web so useful and successful. In the rest of this article, we discuss the various types of links and their importance to modern Web design.

As we said, a link is a text string tied to a URL, and we use links to allow easy jumping from one document to another. That said, there are some nuances worth considering:. A link between two webpages, where both webpages belong to the same website, is called an internal link. Without internal links, there's no such thing as a website unless, of course, it's a one-page website.

A link from your webpage to someone else's webpage. Without external links, there is no Web, since the Web is a network of webpages. Use external links to provide information besides the content available through your webpage. A link from someone else's webpage to your site. It's the opposite of an external link. Note that you don't have to link back when someone links to your site. When you're building a website, focus on internal links, since those make your site usable.

Find a good balance between having too many links and too few. We'll talk about designing website navigation in another article, but as a rule, whenever you add a new webpage, make sure at least one of your other pages links to that new page. On the other hand, if your site has more than about ten pages, it's counter-productive to link to every page from every other page. Confirming pre-web research on signalling theory, they found that people reading passages of text containing blue, underlined hyperlinks, or simply blue words, were more likely to re-read sentences when uncommon words were linked and therefore highlighted.

If working today, Vannevar Bush, whose Memex concept was concerned with books and microfilm, might effectively consider Instagram as one book, Facebook as another book, with information inside in need of liberation via associative trails links. So perhaps shifting trends in hyperlinking can at best be seen as symptoms of wider concerns around the web at Returning to PageRank, in Google advised that social media influencers use no-follow links when including affiliate links on their posts, in which they receive a product sales commission in return for freebies, gifts and sponsorship.

WIRED is a member of affiliate schemes. These were hyperlinked so that the user could click through to get the full context with a mechanism for micropayments to the original author.