Links
are routinely used to connect separate pages of a Web site and to move within a
single lengthy page, providing an alternative organizational strategy to those
used in generating traditional linear print texts. Such links may enable the
reader to read more selectively than he or she may read a print text.
Additionally,
links provide connection with other texts published on the Web by other writers.
Such linking takes the place of paraphrasing or summarizing other writers' views
within the text at hand or in endnotes or footnotes. Annotations of links may
replace the standard bibliography as well as provide content in the page at
hand.
We learn to see links embedded in images or cued by color changes in text, as we move the cursor around the screen. Recognition of links requires a different visual response on the reader's part from the decoding of verbal connections between ideas.