This Has Gone Too Far

Seriously, Peter Orszag is writing a CBO blog now? And you can tell he's really doing it since he doesn't seem to understand how to write text with links:

Marty Feldstein (http://www.nber.org/feldstein/) and Fred Bergsten (http://www.iie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=33) are also on this morning’s panel. You can view the hearing through the House Budget Committee website, at http://budget.house.gov/

It's come to be a strange world we live in.

Comments

Funniest thing I've read all week.

This is the new, cool way to link stuff. It shows where you are going.

Posted by Peter K. | December 6, 2007 10:16 AM

Jeez, this is amazing. It is not that hard to embed links. This is just incomprehensible.

Posted by bob mcmanus | December 6, 2007 11:51 AM

I think you guys are overreacting to this a little bit. There's nothing wrong with the way he does it.

Posted by mad6798j | December 6, 2007 12:53 PM

I think Orzag is doing it on purpose so it's like a footnote embedded in the text. I'll bet a lot of people in Congress and government read printed versions of the blog and not the blog online. If you read a printed version the location of the hyperlink is lost. Orzag is serving his many old school readers well and will gladly take the snark from you instead of a kick in the ass from John Dingell for not showing the source material of his data.

Posted by joejoejoe | December 6, 2007 1:11 PM

John Dingell reads printouts of blogs? I'd rather imagine Orzag doesn't know how to embed links. It's cute. (at least there we'ren't any typos .... )

Posted by Peter K. | December 6, 2007 2:28 PM

Hey Matt,
One shouldn't throw stones. How about adding a target="new" to your links so they pop-up in a new window?

Posted by Zubin | December 6, 2007 2:39 PM

He fixed it.

A quick study!

Posted by Peter K. | December 6, 2007 6:10 PM

how about not doing that because we* do tabbed browsing now??

(*me)

Posted by glenstein | December 6, 2007 7:29 PM

I agree with glenstein.

I hate links that automatically open a new window.

Posted by David Tomlin | December 6, 2007 9:33 PM

I don't know how it is these days, but a while back it was the case that a hell of a lot of people using browsers didn't even know enough to scroll down a page to see text that wasn't visible. They thought all there was was what showed in the browser window.

Embedding links always struck me as assuming that such people knew enough to click on stuff that was highlighted. I know it's supposed to be the way you lay out pages, but it does assume some experience with the Web on the part of your readers. Today, most people probably do know, but that wasn't true even a few years ago.

So it doesn't bother me when somebody does this. What bothers me is when sites try to lock you into their page, or try to force you to read an article over page after page (so they can show you more ads) rather than allowing you to read the whole thing on one page - preferably with no ads. That's insulting to the reader, treating them as merely a pocketbook to be picked.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 6, 2007 11:05 PM