A clear and ever-present danger.
It's easy - too easy - to get carried away, and to let each detail have its own
link. When this happens I often mind myself starting to report on everything that
happens to me. It may be that this is less a problem that stems from hypertext
than one that stems simply from the availability of the World Wide Web - the possibility
of a vast audience (and the probably over-exaggerated belief that someone might
want to read what we're writing), makes too many of us
want to tell all. But even if that vast yet elusive readership may be the more
central reason for web pages that report every detail of what are ultimately (to
this reader, at least) quite boring lives, I'm quite sure that the ability to
link at will to just about anything also bears some of the blame. Anyone who has
spent more time that he or she would ever have imagined possible reading the lists
of what people eat for breakfast each day, or the restaurants they've visited,
or the CDs they've bought and the books they've read, and even the brands of toothpaste
they've tried is aware of what a real, and often distressing, problem
this is.
Go to: The (ir)relevance of hypertext