Hyperlinks were a mistake. Not all of them — the ability to send a reader somewhere else with a click remains one of the medium’s better tricks — but the decision to bury source citations inside the running text, indistinguishable from every other link, has made web writing less trustworthy than it needed to be.
A hyperlink inside a paragraph says: this clause is supported, in some way, by something elsewhere. It does not say by what, or whether the thing is a primary source or a rant. The reader has to click to find out. Most readers don’t click.
The footnote alternative
A footnote — a small superscript number in the text, a numbered list at the bottom of the page — does a different job. It commits to a citation. It can be counted. It can be skimmed. It survives a scrape into RSS.
Styling them on the web is not hard. A sup element with a link, an ordered list at the bottom with an anchor for each item, a CSS rule that numbers them. The browser takes care of the rest.
When not to use them
Short posts. Conversational writing. Anything under 500 words. The overhead of the scaffolding swamps the value. For those, a hyperlink is fine.
But for anything with a claim worth backing — any essay, any argument, any piece a reader might cite — a sources list at the bottom pays off every time.