Blogless

Here’s the lead sentence from my post Monday:

As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

When I wrote that blog post, I revised that sentence several times. It occurred to me that there is an insidious problem with the ambiguity of link references, a problem at which I thought it might be instructive to take a look.

In non-hyperlinked writing, there is a grammatical phenomenon you might remember from your days in primary school called a "squinting modifier". A squinting modifier (sometimes called a two-way modifier) is a word or phrase that might modify one of two or more terms in a sentence. For example:

When I started writing the above sentence, I had only a single link, as opposed to two. It looked like this:

As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

This link is obviously ungainly, if accurate. There was no way it would work; two clauses are one too many from which to parse the content of a link. So, in my next attempt, I realized that a sort of ambiguity that one might consider the semantic counterpart to a squinting modifier was threatening. To wit:

As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

See how the meaning of the hyperlink becomes ambiguous? By my count, the content of the linked page could be one of four things:

1. An article about Apple’s pre-order sales of the new iPhone.
2. An article about both the total sales of the new iPhone.
3. An article that casts doubt on the pre-order sales numbers for the new iPhone.
4. An article that casts doubt on the total sales numbers for the new iPhone.

Now you’re saying: "Who would ever put that hyperlink on Apparently, unless they meant either number three or four above?" Okay, let’s assume that. But you’ll notice also that we still have some ambiguity, even after you’ve got the meaning of the link parsed down that far:

1. An article that casts doubt on Apple’s pre-order sales numbers for the iPhone.
2. An article that casts doubt on the the total sales numbers for the iPhone.

A more semantically correct and significantly more common solution is to place the hyperlink on the sentence’s verb. As it turns out, this solution is also sub-par:

As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, in addition to some 1,00,000 in-store sales.

One can easily see how the expected content of this link suffers exactly the same kind of ambiguity as the links above it.

All this is to say that in that sentence, there was really only one place to put the link, and that was on the direct object, 300,000 pre-orders. Of course, to do that, we now needed two links. Which makes sense, because I’m talking about two different things.

So, watch out! We’re always in danger of having a nicely designed, highly usable blog interface, and then writing that’s full of ambiguous links. And if enough people are clicking links that take them to information they weren’t looking for, you’re in trouble. The work of usability is never done.