Hypertext and the World Wide Web are built on a complex network of ideas that originate in the military and ecological disasters of the short 20 th Century, 1914--1989, and in a world-spanning intellectual effort to prevent their recurrence. Though that effort now appears to have failed, and though the tragic story of the 20 th Century has not, it seems, concluded, we may learn profit by examining the concepts and ideals on which hypertext was built.
HyperCard Changed Everything
The Subversive Hyperlink
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished. The fragility of the Web poses an […]
No Longer No Sense of an Ending
This is my first feature piece on Contents Magazine, about harnessing the properties of hypertext and the Web for superior reader experiences and business results.
How the Web Was Lost – James Gleick
This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Webby Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen WittFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 389 pp., $30
Visionary lays into the web
Ted Nelson is a visionary who is credited with coining the term hypertext, but he is highly critical of what the internet has become.
The story of this blog so far: 'AI', the death of web dev, and feeling like an outsider
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Vision and Reality of Hypertext and GUIs: 2.1.13 Microcosm @mprove
Microcosm (cf. 2.1.13) is a research project at the University of Southampton. Like Intermedia five years before, Microcosm is designed around the idea that material of diverse sources and formats should be tied together into one hypertext. To achieve this goal links have to be separated from the documents. They are stored and maintained in special link databases. In contrast to Intermedia, Microcosm plays the active role in gathering the necessary data out of the documents. For each topic it stores data on which documents contain information about it and also where inside the documents the information is located. This elaborated conception of links can be seen more as a kind of Memex’ trails than simple one-to-one links. Given this structure dynamic linking becomes possible. This means that links can be associated with generic text strings. Wherever this string shows up a link is placed automatically. This has the effect that documents that are imported for the first time into Microcosm can have links immediately.
The Evolution of Creativity
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Hypermedia Systems
The revolutionary ideas that empowered the Web. A simpler approach to building applications on the Web and beyond with htmx and Hyperview. Enhancing web applications without using SPA frameworks.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.
social hypertext
http gave us hypertext. atproto gives us social hypertext.
The web we lost
A melancholy reflection about what happened to the web mixed with some positive imagination about to do about it.
What Was the Internet?
Google Reader was building the wrong future
We Build On Hope @ PublicSpaces Conference 2026
Against the dark forest
J. R. Carpenter || A Handmade Web
The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back.
A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed | TechCrunch
marking off AI slop / seo spam pages experimenting with collective action on the whole internet
HTTP gave us hypertext, atproto gives us "social hypertext"
Building on some of @chrisshank.com's work, what if we had browsers that were atproto-native? orange link = in your PDS green link = in the…