Links and Images

Links are the blood vessels of a document. The three ways of writing them — inline, reference-style, and automatic — each trade readability against maintainability, and image links add the extra requirement that a path and its reference definition have to agree with each other.

This chapter explains why you should switch to reference-style definitions once the same article contains a lot of repeated links — changing the link text in ten places is a very common maintenance burden. It also explains why the rules for triggering an automatic link do not always match your expectations (for example, a URL immediately followed by Chinese text may not be recognized).

By the end of this chapter you should be able to pick the right link style and keep the link text separate from the actual URL.