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01/03/2005 Archived Entry: "Phat Links"
Phat Links
Via Johndan I find Jakob Nielsen's latest rant on hypertext. Typically, I don't find Nielsen very convincing and see so much lost in the concept of "usability." But here's something I like: Fat Links.
Fat links are links that point to more than one page. Now that browsers like Firefox and Safari support tabbed browsing, it's possible to have a link that opens up multiple tabs, and thus lets users access several destinations in one click.
That's a good idea. Only, why not make them phat links?
1. phat
1. cool
2. Pretty Hot And Tempting
Dude! That shit is phat!
Dude! That bitch is P.H.A.T!
Phat links not only open up more than one page, they open up tempting pages, pages that merge all kinds of news, fetishes, desires, sorrow, and . . . for want of a better word, shit.
We gotta teach phat writing! Writing focused on shit (not defecation, but shit, "man, that is the shit"). Like VV's "the turd meaning," only recontextualized for the Web. Once we have phat links (Mozilla team, listen up coders!), we can start instituting a pedagogy of phat/shit where compositions link outward and inward, forging networks that are sensible and not so sensible. That I pull from UrbanDictionary.com should not be lost on you, dear reader. Composition’s heavy interest in the urban (represented in the famous “students right to their own language” and issues of access) speaks to generating phat links, to recognizing the importance of phat to digital writing (mood + shit). In other words, here is an excellent opportunity to open up the “gates” (isn’t that the SF CCCC call?) to the urban (and the implied population of people of color).
Replies: 1 Comment
The phat/fat links come with an inevitable scat(ological)/skat rejection--the user's choices, refusals, shoos. A phat logic of reading/writing the web might get help from re-framing Firefox's "Linky" extension as something like "Phat Links" (where the multi-link opening is rhetorical rather than merely a solitary user's convenience). Nielsen's extension of this notion to fat bookmarks seems less interesting.
Posted by Derek @ 01/04/2005 08:06 AM EST