A writer who wanted to explain the literary allusion "harmless drudges" could offer a hyperlink to a page such as this. The problems with it are:

• if you're working off-line, the linked page won't be available until you reconnect
• even if you're on-line, there may still be network delays in loading the page
• deciding to follow a link in mid-sentence is a big mental step, which you tend to defer
• by the time you return to the original page (if you ever do), you'll have lost your place

For these reasons, it's a nuisance to follow a link for a minor point, so readers often won't bother.

And for the writer, there's the work of maintaining lots of separate HTML pages such as this one.

Back to Quick Look