Fat link

A fat link is a hyperlink which leads to multiple endpoints.

The hyperlinks that are attached to the same design object can be grouped into a fat link for representational purposes, and the activation of a fat link gives a menu of the links contained in it (cf. hyperlink history list), from which individual links can then be activated. [ Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, "Embedding Hypermedia into Information Systems," hicss, p. 187, 30th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) Volume 6: Digital Documents, 1997.]

The concept is also covered in Grønbæk and Trigg's extended Dexter model [Grønbæk, K. and Trigg, R. H. 1996. Toward a Dexter-based model for open hypermedia: unifying embedded references and link objects. In Proceedings of the the Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext (Bethesda, Maryland, United States, March 16 - 20, 1996). HYPERTEXT '96. ACM Press, New York, NY, 149-160.] , which cites the "Instructional Design Environment" [Jordan, D. S., Russell, D. M., Jensen, A. S., and Rogers, R. A. 1989. Facilitating the development of representations in hypertext with IDE. In Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Hypertext (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States). HYPERTEXT '89. ACM Press, New York, NY, 93-104.] .

Now that Web browsers like Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7 support tabbed browsing, it is possible to have a link that opens up multiple tabs, with one target object in each tab. This allows users to access several destinations in one click. It should be noted, however, that the concept predates the World Wide Web [T. Berners-Lee et al, "World Wide Web: The Information Universe", Electronic Networking: Research, Applications and Policy", 1(2), 1992.] .

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