Numerous examples can be found of the link that leads to a link that leads to a link. Often these promise to reveal to us the meaning of life or something else equally enticing yet elusive. The novelty wears off rather quickly. It can be done well, but you have to work at it.
It appears all too easy to play this sort of game. The medium almost invites it. David Reinking, in Me and my hypertext (1997), makes a number of interesting and well taken points. But he also allows himself to plunge into the depths of sophomoric humor. On one page, for example, he adds an "Editor's note" that states:
WHERE IS THIS ARTICLE HEADING? WHERE IS THE STATEMENT OF PURPOSE? A TRANSISTION SENTENCE OR PARAGRAPH IS NEEDED HERE.and when we click on the link associated with that note we read, as we expected:
The editors did not really include the editorial note at the end of the Introduction. I did....On an even more juvenile level the Final Digression tries to give the impression that it is coming to the ultimate and significant point of the entire paper. Reinking is about to tell us the "critical advantage" of hypertext, when the text is suddenly cut off by another editor's note:
THE EDITORS REGRET TO INFORM READERS THAT DUE TO STRICT SPACE LIMITATIONS, WE COULD NOT PUBLISH THE REMAINDER OF REINKING'S ARTICLE....This rather unsuccessful ploy moves from the quaint to the ridiculous when we realize that Reinking's metaphor is one of a text document moved to the web where, among other things, space is not a limitation (if it was on paper). Thus, we're taking part in a joke which loses almost everything in the translation.
Even playfulness has to be done more seriously than this.