The study of the use of hypertext on the web must begin with the fundamentals of web architecture. Originally designed by Tim Berners-Lee, and later expanded by Roy Fielding, the general architectural style of the web is now called REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer. REST is a far cry from what hypertext theorists first intended to become the world's global hypertext system, Ted Nelson has always been extremely critical of the web, writing this tiny plaintext tirade:
I DON'T BUY IN
The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES!
What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined.
The original hypertext project, Xanadu®, has always been about pure document structures where authors and readers don't have to think about computerish structures of files and hierarchical directories. The Xanadu project has endeavored to implement a pure structure of links and facilitated re-use of content in any amounts and ways, allowing authors to concentrate on what mattered.
[...]
Markup must not be embedded. Hierarchies and files must not be part of the mental structure of documents. Links must go both ways. All these fundamental errors of the Web must be repaired. But the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to make nothing else possible.
We fight on.
More later.
REST is technically an architectural style, not an architecture. It's a coordinated set of constraints on the body of potential architectures. This sort of meta-architecture-by-constraint was pioneered by Christopher Alexander, with his widely influential idea of
design patterns. The constraints that make up REST were developed with "anarchic scalability" in mind, to produce a system where there are no centralized bottlenecks to growth. The elimination of two-way links, part of the central dogma of hypertext theory, way a key part of pursuing this scalability: two-way links simply don't scale. The burden of back-links that an immensely popular site would accumulate would be overwhelming, both visually and in terms of bandwidth. REST was developed to try and maximize the following qualities, in no particular order, of global-scale hypertext systems:
Performance, Scalability, Simplicity, Evolvability, Extensibility,
Customizeability, Configurability, Reusability, Visibility,
Portability, Reliability.
The architecture that was created under REST ideals, and that serves as the backbone of the web today, grew into three pieces: URI, HTTP, and HTML. HTTP is the protocol that computers speak to send each other hypertextual documents. One of the most important characteristics of HTTP is that it is designed to be stateless. Both the viewer and the server act as if they forget all about each other, and start fresh with every request. This constraint goes against many of the classic hypertexts, which depended on the ability to keep track of the path of particular readers.
Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the web had an idea that has since fallen by the wayside: the
link type. His paper, "Information Management: A Proposal", had a large diagram on the cover that showed many concepts connected with clearly typed links: "depends on", "is part of", "made", "refers to", "uses", and "is an example of". He wrote down his rationale: "In practice, it is useful for the system to be aware of the generic
types of the links between items, and the types of nodes without
imposing any limitations." There are
many other writers who have weighed in on the usefulness of link types.
This website tries to bring typed links back to hypertext on the web, as one, humble literary form to help enrich your writing. The legend on the left-hand side tells you what color is associated with what sort of link. If you happen to be working on a text, you can click the legend to create link types of your own and choose their colors. It's a modest experiment for the literary system of the web, and has had some interesting results. You can explore the
Grand Library to see what people have been doing with them.
