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BBC website trials new inline linking technology

Last week, the BBC introduced a trial of a new web page linking technology, which enables links to be placed in the text of the article (like this one), but unlike their regular behaviour of taking you to a new page, or opening a new tab, the new method displays a summary of the article in an attractive pop-up region.

You can see a few examples in this story about NASA's Orion ship - at least until the trial finishes.

The BBC's primary reasoning for this, as far as I can tell, is to give the user relevant links in the text, without the possible distraction of finding yourself flying off to an external site in the middle of reading a sentence (possibly unlike Orion, which has been delayed.)

The technology the BBC are using (called Apture) is somewhat interesting: for example, Wikipedia articles are summarised into pages, and files such as PDFs are converted (to Flash in the case of PDFs) to retain the same look and feel as the regular links.

Whilst the overall appearance is quite "whizzy", some people have been complaining that there's nothing wrong with the traditional way of hyperlinking and that the Apture method causes (or may cause) problems with the site's accessibility, and/or older or more obscure web browsers.

The trial was announced on a blog article by Steve Herrmann last week, many people have commented, and Steve has replied, promising they will take all comments into account at the end of trial.

Whatever you may think of the technology itself, I applaud the BBC for the openness of the trial process, listening to the comments of the public, and for getting stuck into trialing new web technologies.

For the record, the links in this blog article are the good "old-fashioned" method!

Neil Smith
Neil

Created on Friday August 22 2008 02:42 PM

Tags: technology web-development

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