One of my fellow editors mentioned that she was taught, in the electronic publishing program she was in, that links to pages other than a website’s home page may infringe the website author’s moral rights because, depending on the design of the website, the viewer may not see the name of the author and perhaps may not see the ads that help pay for the site.
To me, this isn’t a moral rights issue. It’s a know-how-to-design-your-website-issue. If linking to internal pages infringes moral rights, after all, then Google is the most massive infringer of moral rights that has ever existed in all of human history. And guess what… Google is probably the number one way people will find your site. And unless every single keyword they’re ever likely to search for is represented on your home page (which would probably make an incredibly busy home page), you’ll actually be counting on internal pages to draw them. So you’d better design with that in mind.
From my perspective (working for a company that makes websites), a website that doesn’t provide all the pertinent information on any content page is poorly designed. It’s simply unrealistic to think that everyone is going to access a website through the front door, as it were. You can’t assume a visitor to the site will have seen any other page than the one they’re looking at right now. It’s your responsibility to get your ads wherever people will be looking, to put authorship information as appropriate on every page, and not to leave things assumed that you don’t give people a clear way of finding out (e.g., “as mentioned in the previous article in this series,” with a link).
Moreover, if a site’s particularly large or not all that well-designed, it’s a great disservice to your readers not to link directly to the internal page containing the specific information you’re adverting to. Simply to say “Read more about Zaphod Beeblebrox on http://www.everydamnthingintheuniverse.com” might consign readers to a hell of trying to dig through an enormous hackle-schmackle site. (Which, if they’re like me, they will probably do mainly through a site-specific Google search. But if the site has a lot of pages on the same topic, that might not be quick and easy, either.)
All of the above said, however, it is also the best idea in most circumstances to link to the highest-level page you reasonably can. This tends to make it easier for people to find other information and to have a good sense of the site; it also helps avoid broken links due to site restructuring (at least it will if you’re linking to just the root URL). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked on a link that was set to, for instance, http://www.someduedessite.com/home.html just to get a 404 – so I trim off the home.html and get taken right away to index.htm, their new home page. Never be any more specific in links than you have to.
But sometimes you have to! You don’t want to imagine the colour of the imprecations I have uttered when finding, for instance, in the references in some scientific/medical document I’m editing, that the author has given a link just to the root URL of some massive database site. And if the rest of the citation is imprecise enough, I may not even be able to find the original article. The same holds true on consumer websites – don’t link me to some interesting information that it turns out I will need to get ropes and crampons to find because the link just takes me to the home page of a massive, poorly indexed site. Take me where you found the info!
Sesquiotica 