Hyperlinking Instructions

Owned by Daniel Hardman
Last updated: May 31, 2022
2 min read

Normal

Most hyperlinks on a terms wiki use this markdown syntax:

  [text that will be hyperlinked](URL)

If you're linking to another page on the same terms wiki, get the value of URL by taking the name of the page, converting it to lower case, and replacing each sequence of spaces and punctuation with a single hyphen.  So if you're trying to link to a wiki page named "my fancy term acronym (MFTA)", the URL will be "my-fancy-term-acronym-mfta".

If you're linking to a page from a different terms wiki, or to any other internet resource, browse to the location of that resource and copy the URL from your browser's address bar. This CAN be the value of URL. However, a short form is also possible, if the other glossary is hosted from TOIP's github repos:

  [multiword term](multiword_term@glossary)

Glossary is the name of a terms wiki repo. For example, to reference the term "administering authority" from the general TOIP glossary in the https://github.com/trustoverip/toip repo, the hyperlink would look like this: [administering authority](administering_authority@toip).

Attribution

Hyperlinks that give attribution to content with a CC-BY license or similar are a little fancier. They always appear at the end of a paragraph (or a long sentence); readers should be correct in their assumption that what is being attributed is the preceding chunk of text. They look like this:

  [from [name of source](URL_of_source), [license type](URL_of_license)]

When rendered as HTML, these links look something like the one at the end of this paragraph:

Basically, what is going on here is that we are creating two hyperlinks as a pair, with an extra set of square braces around them both. In the graphic, "Wikipedia" is one link, and "CC-SA 3.0" is a different link. The [name of source](URL_of_source) part is managed like a normal hyperlink (see top section of this doc). URL_of_source should never be a link to the same terms wiki, since you don't have to attribute a source internally. The [license type] part should be a string like "CC BY 3.0", and the URL_of_license part should point to the canonical URL for that license. Both of these values can be discovered by browsing https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.