Eastgate Systems, Inc. hails itself as the home for "serious hypertext". The collection of writers concentrated around this organization (and its web site) often write as though they've never heard of Jakob Nielsen. It's not that they revel in the sophomoric joy of seeing how many links they can create in one sentence, not really caring whether someone gets lost or not (there are plenty of these around as well), but rather that they honestly see hypertext as a means to an artistic end. The web is often not the medium of choice for these authors because they seek more robust hypertextual tools, and also because they want to sell their works, and publishing those works in a free medium such as the web doesn't generate much income.
On the Eastgate web site Stuart Moulthrop, one of the pioneers of hypertext fiction, reviews a new text by Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, Forward Anywhere. Early in his review essay Moulthrop pays his dues to the reality of the World Wide Web as seen by Nielsen:
These days most people engaged with information technology concern themselves less with visions of human identity than with social impact and economic productivity.But he sees true promise in the text (it's not exactly a book):
we learn by going where we have to go. Unlike the (delusional) journal back to the world of books, an honest commitment to the future permits no foreknowledge of the destination. Solvitur ambulando. We'll know where we're going when we get there.In other words, some people writing hypertext (and for the web) are still trying to examine its possibilities beyond posting a catalog of items for sale.