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Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is the process of placing on a web page a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image within another website, as opposed to that website's main or home page. Such links are called deep links.
Some commercial websites object to other sites making deep links into their content, either because it bypasses advertising on their main pages or, like The Wall Street Journal, they charge users for permanently-valid links. Sometimes deep linking has led to legal action, such as in the 1997 case of Ticketmaster versus Microsoft, where Microsoft deep-linked to Ticketmaster's site from its Sidewalk service. Many critics charge that such sites simply want to establish policies that will "license" such links to the highest bidder. They argue that links are a fundamental part of "user-oriented" web browsing.
The technology behind the World Wide Web, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), does not actually make any distinction between deep links and any other link—all links are conceptually equal. This is because the World Wide Web in itself does not have a concept of a "website." It is only because of the human user's need to group related web pages together that websites are conceptualized. Thus, the concept of deep linking—linking to pages other than the "home page" of the website.
Examples of deep linking to maps created on the fly can be found at the article Oakland, Illinois. The web addresses contain all the parameters of the maps. Sometimes this is not possible because a cache area (in this case, a shared script that generates an image map) is used to create the desired map through zooming and shifting, and there is no web address that directly gives the resulting map.
External link
- Links & Law (http://www.linksandlaw.com) - case law summary, links to relevant court rulings worldwide and to relevant articles about deep linking
- Linking Law (http://www.netlitigation.com/netlitigation/linking.htm) - Netlitigation's summary and case law archive
- American Library Association (http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/deeplinking.html) - list of (mostly deep) links to articles about deep linking
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