Editing World Wide Web (section)

=== Linking ===
Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:
<syntaxhighlight lang="html" inline=""><a href="http://example.org/home.html">Example.org Homepage</a>.</syntaxhighlight>
[[File:WorldWideWebAroundWikipedia.png|thumb|Graphic representation of a minute fraction of the WWW, demonstrating [[hyperlink]]s]]
Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a ''web'' of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the ''WorldWideWeb'' (in its original [[CamelCase]], which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990.<ref name="W90">{{cite web |url=http://w3.org/Proposal.html |title=WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project |first1=Tim |last1=Berners-Lee |author-link1=Tim Berners-Lee |first2=Robert |last2=Cailliau |author-link2=Robert Cailliau |date=12 November 1990 |access-date=12 May 2015 |url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150502080527/http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html |archive-date=2 May 2015}}</ref>

The hyperlink structure of the web is described by the [[webgraph]]: the nodes of the web graph correspond to the web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called [[link rot|"dead" links]].<!-- Note: if "dead" isn't in quotes, this page will throw a false positive on template maintenance script runs. --> The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive websites. The [[Internet Archive]], active since 1996, is the best known of such efforts.