Certainly when I start preparing a Boidem column I have a relatively clear picture of what I want to say, but it's incredibly easy to get sidetracked. That's pretty much in the nature of a hypertextual environment. But even so, there's a rather logical expectation (on my part, and I suppose on that of my eight readers) that those asides are precisely that - tangents from the main or central focus of the column. More than only a handful of times, however, the internal pages have actually contradicted what I was claiming in the main column page, and sometimes the true gist of what I wanted to get across was, though not purposefully hidden, a couple of generations of links from that main page.
Five and a half years ago I may have been exaggerating when I wrote that:
The tangents were the meat and potatoes of Boidem columns.but as far as exaggerations go, it wasn't overly large. Seven years before that I'd devoted an entire column to the question of what the proper method of reading a hypertextual column should be. I suppose that it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that no definitive answer was reached in that column, nor in any since then that have dealt with that question.