One-way roads and dead-ends along the information highway

Abstract

The graphical World Wide Web, which is no older than a few years, is often regarded as either a new mass medium or a vast resource of information. This text presents a different view of the web, which stresses the web's hypertextuality.

The author touches upon one taxonomy for hypertext, hence characterizing the web as a collaborative hypertext, which shows that the different epithets - i.e. unstructured, unreliable - attributed to the web are somewhat inadequate, and are shadowing the true problems of the web: its lack of metadata, reliable object identifiers and human coordination.