Tutorial 27: The Care and Feeding of Hyperlinks, Part III
A More Practical Example
Of course, not all Web sites are structured like books, and may not fit the model of link relations so well. For such a case, you can mostly improvise when it comes to selecting navigation links. The most important things to consider are: First, where will the reader probably want to go after he's done reading the page. Second, where will the reader probably want to go when he arrives at the page and decides it wasn't what he was looking for.
Home, Up, Start, Next and Prev links obviously fall under this category, and should always be included when relevant. You can use Section and Subsection to point to pages upwards in the hierarchy of your site. The Contents link type can point to a "Site Map" page that shows the structure and has links to all the pages of your site. And of course, an Author link is always relevant.
After you're done selecting these links, you can add some Bookmark type links. Bookmarks are important points of entry into a Web site, and could point to the most important and often visited sections in your site.
So let's examine a page in Acme Computer Corporation's product catalog, a page that describes the brand new MORONS Server. Your links might look like the following:
<LINK REL="Next" HREF="./devel" TITLE="MORONS Developer's Kit"> <LINK REL="Prev" HREF="./client" TITLE="MORONS Client Runtime"> <LINK REL="Up" HREF="../" TITLE="MORONS Product Range"> <LINK REL="Section" HREF="/products/" TITLE="Acme Products"> <LINK REL="Subsection" HREF="/products/transfirbulation/" TITLE="Acme Transfirbulation Software"> <LINK REL="Home" HREF="/" TITLE="Acme Computer Corporation Home"> <LINK REL="Contents" HREF="/sitemap" TITLE="Acme.com Site Map"> <LINK REL="Help" HREF="/help" TITLE="How to find things on Acme.com"> <LINK REl="Copyright" HREF="/legalese" TITLE="Copyright Statement"> <LINK REL="Author" HREF="david@acme.com" TITLE="David Dothead, WebMaster"> <LINK REL="Bookmark" HREF="/about/" TITLE="About Acme Computer"> <LINK REL="Bookmark" HREF="/products/" TITLE="Acme Products"> <LINK REL="Bookmark" HREF="/news/" TITLE="Acme News"> <LINK REL="Bookmark" HREF="/support/" TITLE="Acme Support"> <LINK REL="Bookmark" HREF="/contact/" TITLE="Contacting Acme">
Note that I've used the Section and Subsection link types to point to pages upwards of the current one in the hierarchy of the site. The Contents link points to a Site Map, and the Help link points to a page that explains the structure and function of the site. Also, the five Bookmark links point to important sections in this site.
The exact number and type of links is up to you, and depends on many factors, the most important of which is the size of your site. If your entire site consists of less than ten pages, for instance, you'll probably just link to each one directly. If your site consists of thousands of pages, you'll want to link prominently to the various major sections and subsections, and less prominently to other pages in the current section. You don't have to replicate all of these links in the document head, as this could lead to unnecessarily huge documents, but the more important ones (like Next, Prev, Up, Home and Author) should always be present.
