Have you ever wondered exactly how important links are in the totality of the World Wide Web?  To paraphrase the late Vince Lombardi, links aren't everything, they're the only thing.  Linking is what makes the Web a web.  Without all the digital strings and strands that link every website in the world together and route our browsing requests around and through them, there would be no Web. Links are what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned when he "invented the web" by designing the first web clients and server and defining the URL, HTTP and HTML specifications on which the web depends. Links, links and more links. "Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space," Berners-Lee said at the time. "The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished."

Technology enabling links to "point to anything" did not, however, ensure that the humans at the ends of each digital link could actually view and work with the information they were linking to. In order for what Berners-Lee called "the dream behind the Web" to come true, there had to be at least minimal standards and protocols - universal standards and protocols -- to promote web interoperability.  To develop and propagate these enabling technologies, Berners-Lee, in conjunction with MIT, the European Commission, and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994.  Under Berners-Lee's direction since its inception, the W3C establishes voluntary standards which - when properly adhered to by web designers - enable everyone to access everything regardless of which web browser, computer operating system, or internet connectivity protocol they are using.  If, like Berners-Lee and most people in the e-commerce community, you believe the Web should be an open-source resource available to anyone with internet access, W3C compliance is of crucial importance.

If you believe the Web should be an open-source resource available to anyone with internet access, W3C compliance is of crucial importance

The fact that the vast majority of the world's websites comply with most W3C standards is the reason that we have one internet instead of a slew of loosely integrated "intranets" requiring that you maintain multiple sites for your business, each on a separate host.  The W3C also helps keep web innovation happening because developers can tinker with the source code without the fear of one mega-company taking over a significant segment of the web's capabilities with proprietary, closed-source standards.  It is instrumental in keeping the web alive as a viable public meeting ground rather than a guarded and gated industrial park.

According to LinksManager President and CEO Joel Lesser, creating W3C compliant pages are crucial in maximizing search engine and browser friendliness. "Compliance is in line with our philosophy of trying to keep the web clean, current and easy to use," Lesser says. "Even if the pages themselves have 100% compliant content, if the user's wrapper (header footer html) isn't compliant, then the entire page would not be compliant.  It's important for users to know that compliance is something that they should consider when hiring a web designer."

Recently a special W3C committee, the XML Linking Working Group, completed close to five years of work developing proposed new standards for an XML Linking Language (XLink) which will add even more power to links pages in tomorrow's Web. While the XLink specification is totally compatible with the unidirectional links which we're all using today, it uses XML syntax to facilitate a new generation of multi-faceted, sophisticated links impossible to write in basic HTML. The main advantage of W3c's Xlink protocol is that it supports dynamic links. The idea is to provide one link that gives an end-user access to a wide range of information - a so-called link base - from which he or she can pick and choose whatever specific content they need.

To visualize what this means consider a typical link page as we now know it.  Let's say the site belongs to a vendor of musical instruments and this particular page contains hyperlinks to information about trumpets.  One of the links is "Jazz Trumpet Appreciation Society" and the anchor text says something like "biographical information about famous jazz trumpeters."  So you click the link and get the Appreciation Society's homepage, which contains a bunch of other links to information about King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, etc.  

The proposed XML Linking Language (XLink) will add even more power to links pages in tomorrow's Web

And a large number of additional links to information about trumpet history, differences between the trumpet and the cornet, discographies of trumpet recordings, etc.  In the brave, and as yet far from implemented new world of Xlink you'd click on the Appreciation Society link and instantly get a detailed site map.  From this you would select the various subjects which interested you -- say, for example, Louis Armstrong Cornet Recordings, Armstrong Trumpet Recordings, Playing Techniques: Cornet vs. Trumpet - and click.  All three articles would immediately download and appear on separate tabs in your browser.

But that's only the beginning of Xlink's magic.. the Working Group's proposed protocols also envision a real-time integration of linking and searching.  With this technology, which is probably at least five years away from becoming part of the W3C specifications, you would hit the Jazz Trumpet Appreciation Society XLink and get a detailed table of contents of the Society site plus a list of suggested additional information - all of it actual relevant articles rather than links to home, index, or portal pages.  The end result here is simple, the World Wide Web is constantly growing and changing.  Some of the most major changes are expected to happen very shortly as increased development of XML technology results in the creation of the much-discussed semantic Web, which will automate many of the browsing and housekeeping chores which now now occupy such a big part of the average netizen's day.

While we wait for these new developments, we strongly encourage webmasters and site operators to visit the W3C HTML Validation utility and check to see if your website is W3C compliant.  The utility will show you exactly where HTML and CSS coding errors are on your website, so they can be fixed.  Although there is no way for us to prove it at this writing, our studies indicate that sites which are fully W3C compliant are probably perceived as and given credit for being higher quality sites by many of the major search engines.  It makes sense that when you publish a W3C compliant website, you show the search engines that you are serious about adhering to the standards published by the W3C Consortium.  Sites full of amateurish HTML programming errors are most likely ranked lower by search engines because they give search engine engineers yet another criteria to base rankings on.  Therefore, if you are serious about showing the search engines that your site is optimized for the end user, we encourage you to bring your site into full W3C compliance.  If you use a turnkey shopping cart or similar automated software which produces the HTML code in your web pages for you, and those pages show errors, contact your vendor and tell them to bring their templates into W3C compliance.

Sites which are fully W3C compliant are probably perceived as and given credit for being higher quality sites by many of the major search engines

Along with these fundamental changes to the Web will come even greater opportunities for Web entrepreneurs to build their site traffic through more robust link exchanges offering increased customer service and interaction.   The downside in all this is the fact that adequately implementing an XLink program will probably not be a job for amateurs trying to fit time for creating their link pages into the killing schedule required to run a successful enterprise.  Fortunately, LinksManager is paying attention to these changes.  As new link standards are proposed and adopted by the W3C, you can be sure that our full-time engineering staff will be on top of every development, constantly refining and perfecting your ability to simply and easily enjoy all the business-generating and search-engine optimizing advantages inherent in deploying state-of-the-art links pages.

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