Hypermedia

When I first got on the World Wide Web in 1994, I was excited about hypermedia: the fact that information could be structured not in a linear way and in siloed documents, but by association between any other web document anywhere in the world.

Before too long, though, navigation bars dominated the web, and when you have a navigation bar the information is almost invariably structured hierarchically. Sure, there could be minor crosslinks, but those are by far secondary. "Hierarchical with crosslinks" wasn't the promise of hypermedia; it was a whole new way of structuring information. It didn't seem like hypermedia was living up to the, er, hype.

That is until I thought about updating my personal web site this year. I realized that my web presence had spread into multiple different web sites and subdomains: one for software development, children off of that for specific projects, one for religious beliefs, and one for "personal"—whatever that means. Plus lots of private notes I might have wanted to share publicly but didn't have a place to put them. Talk about a fragmented identity.

I considered combining all of these into one web site, but I struggled with how to structure it. What are my top-level navigation items? Do I have enough to say about all of them? Should "what video games I like" have the same level as “all my knowledge and beliefs on software development”?

That’s when I realized the solution was to just start writing, and when I mentioned a concept that I wanted to elaborate on, link it to a new page. And if I decided later that I wanted to elaborate on something, link it then.

Hypermedia was the solution to the complexity of a person trying to talk about even a fraction of their human complexity. I'm not linear, so this web site isn't either. It's not just an interesting UX, it concretely solves the problem.

That's why this web site doesn't have a navigation bar. You don't need a hierarchical enumeration of each of the facets of my life. Aspects will grow organically over time.

The search, backlink, and local-graph features offered by Obsidian Digital Garden, though, all seem compatible with hypermedia, so I'm keeping those for now.