The end points are 100% under control of the content owner. They are free to decide who to let in and who not to let in. Why should there be any onus on the linker to do anything whatsoever and not exercise their full rights to use hyperlinks any way that they want to?
Of course. The responsibility for maintaining a link lies with the linked to site. My point is there are mechanisms that allow the links on the web to change without breaking it.
But isn’t almost always the link just the current link + the link name?
Apart from being able to tell the client what functions they are allowed to use and a very superficial form of documentation I don’t really get the advantage of it.
The counterargument to this is that you are knowingly using a piece of software that has, and has always had, the default behaviour of autoloading remote resource links it finds in HTML.
That's a good point, and not one that I've considered particularly deeply to be honest. (I'd love to hear other people's point of view on the topic!) I guess in many ways the situation is similar to that around adblock. Ultimately, the links that are overlaid on a particular page should be solely and completely under the control of the user. If the technology that everyone is using permits this kind of behaviour, I'm not sure companies have much choice in the matter.
Linking comes naturally to actual websites made by human persons. It's only the commercial/institutional sites made by groups of people paid money to make them and who therefor don't (and can't) care that make hostile unlinkable websites. And that's not going to change as long as using huge piles of js webcrap is cheapest and easiest for groups of people. I don't think we can ever change that.
This should ignore the lost cause of corporate websites and be a manifesto for human person devs to not take these kind of bad habits home.
The central issue here is trust. If you trust the provider of the url to maintain the link, ensure that it stays alive and pointed to what you expect, then it's fine.
How can that ever be a realistic expectation over anything but the immediate and short term? Not to mention that in the overwhelming majority of cases the "provider" of a URL is not the party responsible for maintaining it.
I have to agree with the parent - unless the recipient of the URL [continuously] validates the source, she is simply asking for trouble down the road.
The complaint should be lodged against the current browser behavior rather than linking itself.
The cognitive cost to follow the link is not cheap because of how browsers work and the way linking is generally used today (even using tabs/additional windows).
Overall I see the article as a call to improving browser technology and more thought and effort by the authors as they write and decide what to link and what not to link.
Having said that I can see why this is annoying and a clear thinking business should allow manual override.
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