There are many terms for what are sometimes referred to as "hypertextual" qualities: intertextuality, associative webs, allusions etc. I think it's important to differentiate between qualities of textuality that began with print texts and the material technology of hypertext (however varied). Did J. Joyce write hypertext? No. M. Joyce? yes. Is Amazon.com hypertext? yes. If you point your browser to a web page and the page has no links on it--is that page hypertext? No. If you go to many such pages and use the go menu (in Netscape) as a linking tool, is it hypertext? Hmmmm, I'm not sure. I guess that it is. No electronic link, no hypertext.

Albert

carbone:
Most broadly, hypertext is any electronic document that can be reached by a link (which makes it part of something larger) or which links to something else. Doesn't matter if its literary, pomo, hierarchical (as are, say, software help guides and manuals), webbased, proprietary software based, harddrive, cd-rom, networked, shared, open, closed, menu driven, blind, reproduceable, reader-able-to-write, or any other variation. Now, what people prefer or what they think the ideal type of hypertext should be, that's another matter. But those opinions and decisions depend upon the audience for both the hypertext created and for the person who argues that hypertext should be this or that.

Generally, however, most people say hypertext IS whatever or however they're doing hypertext. So it was no surprise, sometime back, that Carolyn Guyer, writing in Feed Magazine, argued that while the web is an interesting experimental place for hypertext, it's retrograde in many ways because of technology and the fact that writers on the web weren't up to date on the latest theories and thinking of what hypertext might (read 'ought' in her view) be (see http://www.feedmag.com/95.09guyer/95.09guyer.html). But coming from Guyer's background and pedilictions as a writer and thinker, her stance, really is pretty traditional. T.S. Eliot, for example, described an ideal for poetry that, surprise!, captured pretty much the kind of stuff he wrote.

--
Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
CSU Writing Center (http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/WritingCenter)

ncarbone@lamar.colostate.edu

"Too much of nothing make a man ill at ease. One man's temperature rises, another man's might freeze." --Dylan