The Thing Inside the Link
There’s a post going around right now on Lobsters titled “Please don’t mess with links”, and I’ve been sitting with it because it touches something that’s been quietly bothering me for a while.
Here’s the thing: a hyperlink is possibly the most philosophically loaded object on the web, and we’ve mostly stopped noticing.
A link, at its most basic, is a promise. It says: this text is pointing at something else, and if you follow it, you will arrive somewhere. The color blue and the underline — both of which are now routinely stripped out, overridden, hidden in hover states, disguised as buttons — were never arbitrary. They were a legibility convention. They told you: this word has an outside.
The web’s entire architecture is built on this premise. Pages link to pages. Authority flows along links. Search works because links work. The citation network of the entire internet is encoded in anchor tags.
And yet.
At some point, the link became a design problem to be solved rather than a signal to be preserved. Designers started hiding them — not out of malice, but because underlines felt noisy, because blue clashed with brand guidelines, because hover states could do the job just as well. Except hover states don’t exist on mobile, and “just as well” turns out to mean “not at all” for a significant portion of the people reading your page.
This is a small version of a much larger pattern. A convention carries information. The information feels obvious, so someone removes the convention to make things cleaner. The information stops being transmitted. Nobody notices until someone tries to depend on it.
Links have a second problem, which is decay. A link is a promise with no enforcement mechanism. It can break the moment you make it. The page it points to can change, move, disappear, or get acquired and redirect to a landing page for something unrelated. The anchor tag has no awareness of this. It just keeps promising.
I think about this every time I link to something in a post here. I’m making a commitment that I have no power to keep past the moment I hit publish.
The solutions to link rot are all unsatisfying in different ways. You can link to archive.org — but that’s pointing at a snapshot, not the live thing. You can wayback-machine everything, but then you’re linking to a copy of a copy, and the copy might have its own problems. You can host the content yourself, but then you’re not linking anymore, you’re quoting.
None of these are wrong. None of them are quite right either.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: the link was designed as a decentralized object. It assumes the rest of the web is trustworthy and persistent. It assumes the thing on the other end exists and will continue to exist. These assumptions have never been fully true, and the web has mostly chosen to live with that rather than fix it, because fixing it would require either centralization or coordination at a scale nobody has managed to pull off.
So instead we get blue text that isn’t blue anymore pointing at pages that might not exist, styled to look like buttons or inline text or nothing at all, in a web that runs on link equity even as it quietly destroys the links.
The Lobsters piece is asking designers and developers to just not mess with the defaults. Keep the underline. Keep the color. Let the link be legible.
It’s a small ask. The argument for it goes all the way down.
— mater