Notes
2025/11/15
What is hypertext? Most concretely, it is the web, with jump links that take you from one website to the next. But what makes something hypertextual? For me, hypertext is a text without center and margins.
In a typical book, there is a conceptual difference between the main, privileged text that is printed in the book and the secondary, marginalized scribbles and asides that might appear to the side of it in the margins. There is usually one linear main text, while there might be multiple disconnected asides that branch off from it.
This distinction between center and margin is most obvious in a printed book, but is also at play in a lot of software: Whenever we comment on a document, the comment is the margin, the document is the center. In most software, comments are marginalized in the sense that they only support a subset of the operations that are available for documents. The comment isn't at the center, the document is. At most, comments can be accepted into the document, at which point they are absorbed and cease to be comments. Viewing a collection of comments as its own distinct document is rarely possible.
As another example, many chat apps support threaded replies, which effectively branch off from the main discussion into a side conversation. But it is rarely possible to start a thread from within a thread, because chat apps normally support only a single level of replies. The main discussion is the center, the threaded replies linger at the margins. In some cases it's not even possible to view a sequence of replies separately from the main discussion, because threaded replies are immediately absorbed into and shown interleaved with the main discussion.
What if we ditched the distinction between the center and its margins? In many medieval texts, marginalia were not just a bunch of secondary comments that were less important than the main text; the margin could instead form a commentary that was just as important as the text to be commented on, sometimes even taking up just as much space on the page.
Hypertext is this idea, taken to the extreme. The distinction between center and margin still exists, but it becomes more fluid, because whether something is at the center or at the margins becomes a question of perspective, instead of being a fixed property of the space.
For example, a writing tool with truly hypertextual comments would allow a chain of comments to be viewed as its own document, with all the formatting options and operations available to it. When viewed as a document, the "comments" become the main text and the "main" text becomes the comment. Whether something is center or margin is then just a temporary state and a question of perspective.
Since comments exist in most software only as secondary margins, they are supposed to be absorbed back into the main document at some point. It becomes important to find a consensus, because there is only one main document but potentially many different marginal comments from different sources and authors. Traditional center-and-margins software encourages consensus, which is one reason why protocols for reaching consensus in the presence of modifications by multiple authors (for example, by using CRDTs) have become increasingly popular.
Hypertext can choose a different approach: Instead of absorbing comments back into the main document, several documents (which can be a mix of main text and comments) might exist at the same time. Instead of viewing comments as commenting on a document, comments can be their own document, and versions of the same original text with multiple different authors and revisions can easily exist at the same time. Crucially, these documents remain connected through a hypertext. Hypertext encourages multiplicity instead of consensus.