My first thought when reading the Ted Nelson extract is that hypertext is much better suited to an online platform than a book. It seems much more practical for a book to be presented in a sequential order, instead of readers flipping back and forth through different sections of the book.
However, I don’t think many websites are designed for users to read through all the information in a linear order. Usually users are just directed to the specific piece of information they are looking for (an ‘about us’ or ‘contact’ page, or a specific news article, for example). It should be easy for users to find exactly what they are looking for through menu links on the homepage, or by heading straight to a page of interest from a Google search itself. You do occasionally come across websites that are presented in a sequential order like a book, where at the bottom of the page there is a link to the next section, as if the person were turning the page to the next page or chapter. On that note, I find it really annoying when websites post articles across a number of pages (like this article from the Mayo Clinic, for example). Your article is online, why does it have to be posted on separate pages when I can just scroll down and keep reading? If the article’s too long, consider cutting out some words or splitting it into different sections. I know some websites do it to increase page views, but as a reader it just annoys me and makes me think you don’t understand how the internet works. In my research I did find this article that lists ways you can turn multi-page articles into a single page so there you go.
Getting back to the reading, I was surprised how accurate Nelson was with his prediction and ideas of the internet (lets hope his predictions about the end of the world aren’t so accurate). For example:
‘A universal repository hypertext network will change that: it will make stored text and graphics, called on demand from anywhere, an elemental commodity, like water, telephone service, radio or television.’
‘Publishing in the new medium will be the storage of text (and other material) in repositories. Readers will call what they want to their screens as easy as turning pages.’
It appears that he accurately predicted how the internet would function but he was not aware at that time of the sheer scale of it (stating that in 2020 there would be hundreds of thousands of file servers, when in reality this is just a fraction of the number in use today).
I also get the sense that for us, reading this extract now in the age of the internet, what Nelson is saying makes sense as we can relate it to what we know about how the internet works, but if you were reading this back at the time it was published, for most people it would have meant next to nothing, and they would have been left completely confused as to what they had just read.
Extract from: Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report On, and Of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print.
