[tomc1985]

I had to stop reading after a few paragraphs. His assertion that linking belongs to "content producers" is ludicrous. Those content producers have given users the tools to do linking themselves, and they express themselves in a variety of ways over a variety of mediums.

You need to learn how to write to express yourself with written word, yet how many people do we here harping on how difficult it is to learn language?

At some point we can draw a line and say, "if you want these abilities you need to learn these things". We did so with literacy, with driving, and with so many professional trades. We can do so with basic internet literacy.

[ergothus]

> Those content producers have given users the tools to do linking themselves, and they express themselves in a variety of ways over a variety of mediums.

? How can I link to, say, a quote in that article that offends you? I can't. How can I link to a youtube video and add my own commentary links? I can't (I think) without creating my own video that explicitly copies the original (rather than consuming it).

> You need to learn how to write to express yourself with written word, yet how many people do we here harping on how difficult it is to learn language?

I definitely wish people took the time to work on that skill instead of assuming it's both automatic and that their level is adequate. Nonetheless, this doesn't seem related to the point of the article - not that linking is HARD, but that, outside of whatever the creator enabled, all we get are top level URLs.

[ianbicking]

> How can I link to a youtube video and add my own commentary links? I can't (I think) without creating my own video that explicitly copies the original (rather than consuming it).

You can write a blog post and embed the video with timing information.

Of course embedding is largely the same as transclusion, among the features touched upon by open hypermedia.

While you don't get full expressivity without a blog or something that allows full HTML, you can get most of this in other mediums (e.g., Twitter) where the video is embedded automatically given a link. In theory OEmbed (https://oembed.com/) is a standard for something like transclusion, though it's not very widely supported.

Constructing a link to a point in time in a video is a non-standard operation (you just have to know the YouTube interface). Similarly there aren't great patterns for finding a link to a position in a web page. But the pieces are all kind of there, though missing the controls and patterns to bring them together. Which is a failing of browsers, though that points in the opposite direction of the claim in the title of this piece (i.e., it implies to me that we need browsers to go deeper, not increase the breadth of linked applications).

[humblebee]

I believe what is meant by the statement is only content producers can add external links to content they produce.

I am unable to take any content and add additional annotation for others to utilize. There appear to be other projects that try to introduce this functionality though such as hypothes.is [0].

It looks like the author is proposing an overlay system that can be applied to a variety of content types. Users can then apply different overlays that are geared towards different topics / audiences. Basically a swappable reference section.

[0] https://web.hypothes.is