WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND
Links appear in many forms and have many different underlying representations. The simplest case is an in-text hyperlink, but other cases include block-level links, list items, object reference relation values, and so on.
By [Ctrl]-[Alt] clicking a link, a contextual interface could appear displaying links present on the destination object. The interface should indicate the link’s nature (e.g. in-text, list item, relation-value) and arrange links according to their approximate spatial relationships on the main object (i.e. a miniature version of the object should appear, but all non-link content is collapsed in ellipses elements or simply omitted).
REAL WORLD USE CASES
The primary use case is to accelerate user navigation when the user is uninterested in intermediary objects. For example, if I have courses, textbooks, authors, and school in my knowledge base, and I am viewing a course, I could use this interface to quickly navigate to the course textbook’s author’s alma mater without having to actually open the text book and author objects.
But there are other use cases. One is high-level exploration, where users want to get a sense what objects exist and are connected in what way without needing to see their content.
Another more interesting use case is this interface’s future potential to be used for describing and specifying graph patterns or derived relations. After all, clicking on the final object in a chain of hyperlinks need not necessarily mean “navigate to the final object”.
