The Web is trivially simple – massively successful and its like Karaoke – anybody can do it.

I have long been alarmed by people’s sheeplike acceptance of the term ‘computer technology’ – it sounds so objective and inexorable – when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.

But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in – make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.

The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there’s a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.

The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions – everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT – ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

The point is that these decisions they’ve made are partly for your convenience and partly for theirs and partly out of stereotypes that they carry with them from the conventions of the computer field.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry.

Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged – people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.