Say it ain't so!
Oh, how I wish that I didn't have to write that! After eight years of these columns,
try as I may, I only occasionally, even only rarely, break out from that basic
trunk, branch, branchlet structure. Sometimes I change its name and refer to it
as a rococo information structure, and sometimes I let the culinary aspects of
my life take over, and then I refer to the ice cream, the topping, and the cherry
on the topping. Whichever metaphor I choose, in all of them the basic structure
of branching out into riverlets and small streams
remains the same - the central trunk is almost always the unifying structure that
gives coherence to the whole.
And that's so even though things really don't have to be that way. The beauty
of hypertext lies not in maintaining a hierarchical structure, but in breaking
out from it.
Go to: The (ir)relevance of hypertext