Definition

Text Menu

“Words that yield” is how Michael Joyce referred to anchors in afternoon, a story [27]. The instructions for activating links simply stated, “You may double-click any word within the text to follow alternate lines of the story. Some, especially significant words yield, bringing you to new story lines.” By the time he had written Twelve Blue, the term “link” had become so familiar that Joyce was able to instruct:

“The story threads quite obviously along its edges, like frayed cloth, in the left window. You'll find links there. There are passing links within the text on the right as well, but these, once followed, go away.” [29]

These instructions assume readers are familiar with the function and form of links. This becomes a shorthand for a complicated process: a link is presented as a trigger on a screen, consists of instructions for presenting other content when triggered--thus the trigger is what yields, what brings you to new story lines. Other writers have visualized anchors in surprisingly different ways.

It is important to note that elements other than words can yield. Anchors can also be connected to icons, graphics, parts of graphics, or just areas on a screen.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium, the proper term for the places that present an element that yields is “anchor:”

An area within a the [sic] content of a node which is the source or destination of a link. The anchor may be the whole of the node content [for example, popup ads] . Typically, clicking a mouse on an anchor area causes the link to be followed, leaving the anchor at the opposite end of the link displayed. Anchors tend to be highlighted in a special way (always, or when the mouse is over them), or represented by a special symbol. An anchor may, and often does, correspond to the whole node. (also sometimes known as "span", "region", "button", or "extent") [121] .

In keeping with this definition, an anchor is more than simply the places that yield to the start of the link.

Here, the use of the term “anchor” is interesting in that it signifies something needed to fasten the link to a specific location, as if the link were likely to float way otherwise.Yet, even with this official terminology, there has been so little attention given to the anchor as opposed to the link that there is actually some confusion about what is the anchor.

Part of the confusion stems from the initial uncertainty as to whether there needed to be a term to designate the endpoints of a link.  According to Jim Whitehead [125] in "As We Do Write: Hyper-Terms of Hypertext," the term, "anchor," was originally coined by Norm Meyrowitz.  Before that time, there were many terms used to indicate a link endpoint (from "button" [used in hypercard] to "link indicator" [used in Sun's Link Service]).   When the term, "anchor" was proposed to the Dexter group, they argued over whether such a term was needed.  In the end, "anchor" was adopted to indicate a link anchor.  The term was then picked up by Berners-Lee when developing a model for the World Wide Web.  As a result, many sites discuss the anchor as the tag in an html document that creates the link, the <a> and </a>, while the piece of the node that yields is simply called the “ link” or “linked text.”

For the purposes of this text, we are using the term "anchor" to refer to that portion of the link that the reader uses to activate the link. They are words that yield, symbols that yield, graphics that yield, parts of graphics that yield, or simply places on the screen that yield when a reader clicks on them. In short, anchors are the visible portions of the link that are often overlooked in link analyses.

Others such as Anna Gunder have further delineated anchors. Gunder makes a theoretical distinction between unidirectional linking ("when there is no explicit back link") and bidirectional linking ("when an explicit back link links back to its source"). She provides an example of a unidirectional link (footnotes going back to an originating page) but does not provide examples of a bidirectional link [89, p. 114] . Gunder then further delineates bidirectional links as "homoancoral" which use the same anchor for both forward and back links, and "heteroancoral" which use different anchors for forward and back links. In our survey of basic efferent sites and aesthetic works, we found only one example of bidirectional links outside of menus and back buttons (25 Ways to Close a Photograph [41]). Thus, we use the term "anchor" to refer only to anchors which are portals to either a single link or to multiple links, but not a bidirectional portal.