What if links weren't meant to be prose?

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URL
https://subconscious.substack.com/p/what-if-links-werent-meant-to-be
Author
Gordon Brander

Interesting thoughts on wikilinks and other ways of linking.

Thoughts from Agora matrix:

@flancian

  • it seems /they-can-be-slugs?
  • at which point they seem actually the same shape as [[wikilinks which are phrases]], but harder to write the longer they are
  • I agree that the synonym problem is there for wikilinks, but I think doing things like [[canonical | what you want to render]] is just one way of 'solving' that
  • in the Agora I've been trying to not care about plurals/variations, assuming we will make them coalesce semantically/socially
  • that feels like the best solution to me right now and could work as a counter-argument to Gordon's position? not that this needs to be a debate, more like a dialogue :)

@doubleloop

  • I don't fully grok what the suggested problem is with wikilinks - but Gordon's got lots of good thoughts/provocations so worth considering! Like the idea of modeless markup is a good one, but no reason why wikilinks can't be that.
  • I don't think I would use a wikilink to link to an actual URL like in his example
  • My own current 'issue' is that wikilinks tend to push me to linking specifically to a concept, rather than linking a chunk of text to a concept… and quite often that text is an interesting piece of meta-info on the link
  • I used to do that but then stopped doing it in order to link specifically to node names
  • But maybe I should go back to wikilinks which are phrases and see what happens, I like your idea that these things will coalesce over time one way or another

Wikilinks which are phrases is kind of in line with Andy Matuschak's ideas on titling evergreen notes, also.

1. Elsewhere

1.1. In my garden

Notes that link to this note (AKA backlinks).

1.3. Mentions

This page last updated: 2023-03-17 Fri 16:15. Map. Recent changes. Source. Peer Production License.