By analogy to hyperlinks in World Wide Web documents, link annotations allow external data (including documents, images, and audio annotations among other possibilities) to be associated with specific locations in a record. In fact, any URL that can be understood by a supported web browser can be used to specify the location of external data in a link annotation. Within the link annotation, the URL appears as the first part of the aux string (in the Text field of the Annotation Template). If the aux string contains any spaces, any characters following the space are treated as a label to be displayed by WAVE in place of the URL itself.
Support for link annotations is a new feature of WAVE 6.0. To view
the external data associated with a link annotation, select the link
and press 
(or 
).
If your web browser is not already running, this may take a few
moments while WAVE starts it. If nothing happens after a minute or
so, check WAVE's Analysis Commands window for errors that may
have occurred when WAVE attempted to start your web browser.
(WAVE uses Netscape 1.1 or any later version by default. See
WAVE and the Web
for details on obtaining Netscape, or on configuring WAVE to use a
different web browser.)
Link annotations may be moved, copied, attached to specific signals, inserted, changed, and deleted just as for any other annotation. WAVE does not include built-in facilities for editing the external data, however; other software such as a text editor or a special-purpose HTML editor may be useful for this purpose.