Bye Bye HyperText: The End of the World (Wide Web) As We Kn

[Heinrich C. Kuhn]

Gerry McKiernan wrote:

>     The potential of using an entire document or a corpus of 
> documents as the fundamental information source and not just 
> tag or metatag data, may  may make the hypertext link as the 
> conceptual relator to other documents secondary. 

Probably I did not quite understand what you say, but never-
theless (and eager to learn by any correction):

I'm not sure: Metadata will still be needed even if you have
indices for all the words in all the documents of this world,
at least as long as there is more than one language, and more
than one way to use any one language to write about a certain sub-
ject. Neither subject indexing has not been made redundant by the 
option to search the full text of certain fulltext databases,
nor have bibliographies been made redundant by the availability 
of bibliographic databases of all kinds. And to do without 
quotations and references would make writing and reading not 
easier in my view.

> The hypertext link may take on less of an associative role
> and more of a structural role.  

Links in many (if not even most) cases serve as references
to other texts. Nearly all the text we write (at least those
which we write for research journals or the web) contain such re-
ferences to other texts. I doubt whether the "associative role"
of links will vanish before the intertextual character of texts
vanishes. And I do not see how nor why indexing all the words
of all the texts should change their intertextual character.


> In this New World (Wide Web) View, the
> the contents and concepts of documents become primary, and the 
> hypertext link becomes secondary. 

In my view this was so already from the beginnings of the WWW:
links *serve* the authors to convey certain informations, they
are not the things because of which you write a text, but the 
things with which you write a text.

> The meaning of a document will derive from the
> document and not from a symbolic substitute.

As always: from the document and its context as perceived by
the readers.

> 
>     Through Data and Information Visualization the concepts and
> contents of a document will be presented to the user in a dynamic
> 3-D visual landscape, map, room, or cityscape that can be browsed
> as naturally as one browses 'real space'.

My visual immagination fails me: I'm even unable to form a 
3-D visiual landscape out of this my email (unless I print it
out on paper and crumble it, of course [:-)]   ).

With a bit puzzled regards

Heinrich C. Kuhn
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