By: Nana K. Yorke, Graduate Student Assistant, Learn & Work Ecosystem Library; Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

On the Term “Hyper”

Overall, hyperlinks connect hypertext documents to one another on the Internet. These documents are most commonly formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and are known as webpages. A collection of webpages organized under one domain name is known as a website. To understand hyperlinks, it helps to better understand what the hyper in these two terms means.

The word hypertext has etymological roots in both Ancient Greek and Latin. Our English prefix “hyper” comes from the Ancient Greek preposition “ὑπέρ” (hupér) meaning “over,” “above,” or “beyond”—like “super” in Latin. Our English noun “text” comes from a specific participial form of the Latin infinitive “texere” (“to weave”)— “textus” which is translated as an adjective meaning “woven” or in some cases, the noun “web.” Over time “text” came to refer to the composition of a literary work.

In this context, hypertext could be best interpreted to mean text that appears on the Web. In fact, while the term “internet” can refer to various kinds of internetworked computers, the World Wide Web refers specifically to the Web woven by hyperlinks accessible via the Internet (the global system that uses the Internet protocol suite), hence the “www” in most universal resource locations (URLs). In this way, the World Wide Web is the Web of all webs or the most extensible network of the Internet. Preceding www is “http(s)”, short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (Secure), the protocol that allows for hyperlinks to build the Web. The hyper in hypertext and hyperlink refer to the extensibility of this type of web structure, moving beyond linear text and beyond physical connections.

Hyperlinks As Strands of the Web

Cyberspace’s physical structure is bound by the internetworking of computers and cables (or the signals used to emulate those physical connections); cyberspace’s conceptual structure can only be bound by convention. Therefore, it is the linking of webpages that gives the Web its structure. Search engines rely on web crawlers (also known as spiders) to find the webpages that exist, and the easiest way to find a webpage is through a hyperlink from a known website. Without hyperlinks, webpages become cut off like a piece of silk drifting, unconnected to its web—or more relevantly, like a computer with no connections. Thus, when considering user navigation on a website, relevant, consistent, and properly maintained hyperlinks are of utmost importance.

Principles of Hyperlinking

This past spring, I have had the opportunity to put into practice these kinds of concepts in my role as a Library Content Specialist with the Learn-and-Work Ecosystem Library. In updating the various initiative or organization pages on the Library website, I focused on these three principles of hyperlinking: maintenance, consistency, and relevancy.

• Maintenance refers to the checking of links to make sure they are not broken, and if they are, figuring out why. Sometimes the page still exists, but the link no longer points to that same page. Sometimes the page no longer exists, and you need to see if it was ever archived.
• Consistency refers to the application of guidelines when it comes to linking—this may include considerations such as the density of links on a page, where links are situated (i.e., In-text, at the bottom, etc.), or whether the hyperlink uses anchor text or not.
• Relevancy refers to how important to a potential user a particular link would be on a particular page. This principle addresses various questions:
  • How likely is a user to want to access ‘this’ particular link when browsing ‘this’ particular webpage?
  • Does this link make an important connection to another webpage or website that otherwise would not be there?
  • Does this link help a user gain further context or information for the content on this page?

Hyperlinking in Context

While physical libraries typically organize their information through spatial relationships, digital libraries like the Learn-and-Work Ecosystem Library primarily organize the information through the linking of content. Especially for a specialty library like this one, where new users may be less familiar with the nature of information within it, proper hyperlinks become all the more significant.

When it comes to relevancy, I tried to create in-text hyperlinks to other pages within the Library website to help users and search engine indexes create conceptual links between pages that are relevant to one another. When it comes to consistency, the main guideline I imposed was to try to make the anchor text as descriptive of the linked page as possible, providing the user with information for whether they would want to access the link or not.

Maintenance came up any time I came across broken links. For pages that have moved, the process involves doing searches on the target website for similar information to find the new link or consulting a search engine like Google to see if the new page has been indexed. In other cases, it may be best to use an archived link for pages that are gone, some of which can be found via the Wayback Machine. Link rot will likely continue to be a problem in the future, so archiving important pages and regular maintenance of links on a webpage will continue to be central to keeping hyperlinks useful on a website. This is not to say that these are the only principles a person could think about when determining how to go about using hyperlinks on their site, but for this Library, I think that keeping these principles in mind helped give the website even more structure through well-reasoned linking practices.

Sources

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Lewis, C. T. & Short, C. (1879). Texo, xui, xtum. In A Latin Dictionary. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Retrieved May 30, 2025, from https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dtexo#:~:text=that%20which%20is%20woven%2C%20a%20web

Liddell, H. G. & Scott, R. (1940). Ὑπέρ. In Jones, H. S. & McKenzie, R. (Eds.), A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Retrieved May 30, 2025, from https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Du(pe%2Fr#:~:text=above%2C%20exceeding%2C%20beyond

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