Take a critical look at the Dr. GUI entry for the July 1996 MSDN Library ("Dr. GUI Gets Webbed"). Note all the little green links on it. Try some. Enjoy the dada-esque hyperlinking.
In the first sentence, the word "environment" links to the C RTL documentation for getenv(). Later on, in the section title "Theme from the PDC: Activate the Internet," "Activate" is a link to activating embedded OLE objects.
In "The really interesting Web applications are those with which you can interact, not those that are static," the word "static" takes you to an explanation of the C/C++ keyword.
In "4 out of 5 developers [...]," the word "out" links to OLE memory management.
In "Unfortunately, he didn't get a chance to write down exact question nor the names of people who asked them [...],", "write" links to issues of porting to the Macintosh, and "names" links to an explanation of C++ namespaces.
I've worked on a multimedia product where we automatically generated HTML, and of course we had plenty of these juggernaut-automaton-gone-wild hyperlinks. But we also hand-edited a lot of them out, and given a chance to refine the process, we would have automated removing a lot of them. And that was with only one full-time engineer working on the problem. Surely the Microsoft Developer Network has the ability to rein in some of its more spurious hyperlinking?
Larry Hastings
Dr. GUI has egg (no, make that a dozen eggs) on his face. But they've all been properly cooked, so the good doctor won't come down with salmonella. He takes no comfort in the fact that his column isn't the only article on the July CD that's been affected by this problem.
It's caused by a bug in some internal link-management software. We discovered this bug too late to make changes for the July CD. We know it'll be fixed after October; we're currently doing everything we can to improve the situation for the October CD.
In the meantime, since we have plenty of eggs, we're making omelettes.