hypertext arrives

Hypertext never really took off the way its inventors and visionaries thought it should. Why? It's a lot of work. Creating a well-structured hypertext document with relevant links is an editing nightmare.

It's also a pain to maintain. Links go stale as whole presences drop off of the web. F'rinstance, if you want to talk about James Joyce, one of the very best references on the web is just some guy. If you create a document that has links to his site, what happens if any of the myriad things that can go wrong does, and his whole site goes away? Your doc is affected. You need to fix all your links that used that resource.

Plus! The amount of discretion put into determining which links are valid and which are invalid.

Now, with a couple of Firefox extensions, all that stuff is irrelevant. The Googlebar has a context menu option to "search for selected text." This gives you web, news, image, dictionary, and newsgroup search of whatever term in a doc you feel like searching on. The action is slightly more convoluted than a straight click-on-a-link, but it's much more seamless than copy-and-paste, or type-into-a-search-box. Now the user has control. Which words or groupings of words are you interested in? What kind of search are you interested in? The reader gets to choose. All the author needs to do is write. Authorial and editorial control are still completely available. But if the authro didnt bother to hyperlink the word "gnomon" to a good definition, the reader is about one second away from doing it himherself.

What's great is that this recognizes the impermanence of the web. There may not be a google in the future, or a dictionary.com, but a simple select and search can point anywhere. It will take advantage of future technologies (a multimedia search, a better image search, &c.).


Hypertext is coming closer to realizing its potential.

EDIT:
I just realized that this works best going from specific to general. Like, if you see the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" and search on it, you'll fond out more than you ever wanted to know about zero-wing. But if your doc has the phrase "meme" and you want it to go to a flash animation of the AYBABTU song, then the right-click thing isn't going to work real great. hmmm.