Comment by leephillips
4 years ago
Everything about this web page is awesome. The rest of the site is pretty sweet, too (there is a “proof” that π is rational that I enjoyed).
I especially like the links to related work. Too many people write about what they made, or put up a page explaining something, giving the impression that they are the only ones who ever wrote about the thing or did any work on it in the history of human thought. The web thrives on linkage.
>> The web thrives on linkage.
It does, but a business never wants you to leave their site so outbound links are considered bad. Oddly, they love inbound links which would be outbound for someone else. Some people extend this to their blogs, as it is definitely important for SEO using the original page-rank algorithm.
Now that I think of it, having no outbound links is a great way to rank a page as less useful in some sense.
It does make it less useful, in an objective sense. Before the web, the practice of linking to other work, through footnotes, references, or just mentioning it in the text, was essential for anything to be taken seriously, and an absolute requirement for any scholarly publication. The web is, potentially, a wonderful evolution of this custom. You’re right about some commercial sites avoiding outbound links, but none of the ones I write for; all my editors encourage it. And there is no excuse to find this tendency to isolation on a personal site. I tend to avoid reading, and especially linking, to resources without good outbound links.