Looking, of course, for something else.
Every few years I go to the library and check out David Olson's The World on Paper.
It's one of those books that helps me focus on how writing influences the way we think, and that's often much more interesting than the latest app. It was on a recent visit to the library, and to the shelf with Olson's book, that I found, right next to it, Vandendorpe's. Perhaps I should have been familiar with it, but I wasn't. So it came home with me as well.
Actually, I guess it made sense that until then I hadn't seen Vandendorpe's book. Most of my reading on hypertext took place well before the English edition of his book was published. Though I certainly wasn't complaining, I was frankly a bit surprised that theoreticians were still barking up the hypertext tree - which to a certain extent they weren't. This was, after all, a translation of a book published a decade earlier. Still, I was happy to read it, even if that reading created more than a bit of ambivalence. Even a staunch believer in associative hypertext like myself could, for instance, easily identify with a statement like:
The normal mode of navigation in a hypertext is by clicking on links that provide access to information nodes on the same page or another page: texts, images, and visual or sound clips. At first glance, this operation is simple and obvious. However, clicking on a word in a text is always a leap into the unknown, since it involves leaving an established context. And the reader does not always know to what extent the new data found will match the previous context. Perhaps the new node will present only an association this is quite distant from the subject at hand, one the reader could very well have done without. (p. 131-132)
But those sentences were part of an examination of what Vandendorpe referred to as "weak links". Only a couple of sentences later in that same chapter he noted:
A partial solution to these problems of decontextualization would be to give readers a way of knowing immediately what type of content each of the links on a page will lead to. Ideally, it should be possible to distinguish between endosemic links, which develop a concept in greater detail, and exosemic links, which are related to the hyperlinked word only by association. With the possibilities opened up by XML, it would also be possible to distinguish between links pointing to different types of information such as bibliographic references, definitions, or supplementary explanations.
Some people have recommended not making links on single words, but only on phrases. A phrase can restrict meaning more than a single word and thus provides a context that allows readers to have a clearer idea of what they are clicking on. This solution, however, also has the effect of substantially increasing the space occupied by colored links on the page, making them more blatant and intrusive.
The reference to XML hints that this is an addition to the new edition, and to my mind seriously detracts from the value of some of his earlier observations. In 1999 writing about how a click is a "leap into the unknown" is a meaningful observation. Doing the same thing in 2009, and dealing with "the space occupied by colored links on the page", makes hypertext into little more than an extension of punctuation marks. These played a significant role in the development of written texts, but are hardly significant in today's digital environment.
Go to: Things were different back then, or
Go to: It's in its DNA, or
Go to: How to write a Boidem column.