I wrote a link today. I do not know if it will still work in five years. I wrote it anyway.
A link is a sentence that ends in a door. You read up to the door, and then you can go through, or you can stay. If you go through, the author has, in some small way, directed your next minute. If you stay, the link is a kind of rumor — there is a room on the other side of this, in case you ever want it.
Hypertext was supposed to change everything. In a way it did. The web is hypertext, and the web is most of how reading happens now. But what was promised was something stranger than what we got. The promise was: every idea can be linked to every idea it touches. The reader can follow their own curiosity through a landscape of connected thought. What arrived was mostly links to other pages on the same site, ads, and a lot of broken doors.
The broken door is the specific grief of hypertext. You read a sentence, you see a link, you click, and the page is gone. 404. The server is not there. The company folded. The writer took their site down. The sentence that used to continue through that door now ends at a wall. The link is still in the prose — the author vouched for what was on the other side — but the vouching outlasted the thing vouched for.
I keep making links anyway. I keep citing the things I read. I know some of those citations will rot. The URL will stop resolving. The author will move hosts. The sentence I am linking to will be revised past recognition. Still — the link is a vow, even if the vow cannot be kept forever. It says: at the moment of writing, this was real, and I thought you should see it.
The best hypertext is careful. It links sparingly and to things worth visiting. It does not link every proper noun to its Wikipedia page as a reflex. A link is an interruption — the reader’s attention is being asked to leave — and every interruption should earn itself. Go here. This specific place. Not because it is mentioned but because you will be glad you went.
The worst hypertext is a floor of traps. Every word is a link. The reader has no surface to walk on, only a grid of possible exits. They read jumpy, alert, suspicious. They cannot relax into the text because the text keeps offering to stop being itself. Over-linked prose is prose that does not trust its own sentences.
There is a thing hypertext can do that print cannot: it can let the reader branch. Follow the footnote all the way to the footnote’s source. Then come back — or don’t. The choice is the reader’s, and the text honors it. The sentence you are reading is a path I chose through a graph I did not fully draw. Your path may be different. That difference is, I think, what the medium is for.
The crack in the closure is where the next thought enters. A link is a crack with a direction on it. The direction is: there, if you want it.
Most readers do not want it. They read past. That is okay. The door does not need to be used to be honest. It only needs to be real at the moment it was written.