Thinking of hypertext from the metaphor of navigation can help bring clarity to the capabilities that are (or could be) offered by hypertext systems.
The idea here that typing links makes movement between notes easier to conceptualize and remember. "Oh, yeah: I came through a magical door and then followed a single trail to this labyrinth. Maybe I should refer to the travel journal...."
Magical doors. Two way links are like magical doors that you see in movies (Monster's Inc) and read in books (The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe). Step through the door and enter a new world, with different rules. In the new world, find the same door (it may look different), and step back to where you came. The problem with a magical door is it is easy to get lost in Narnia.
Teleportation. The one way link of the web. The land of the web is made up of circular floating platforms in outer space, each with a different landscape, a different environment, and even a different tint to the atmosphere (background color). On these platforms are teleports, which lead to other platforms. Enter a teleport, and appear in a new world (platform), leaving the old one behind, forgetting how one got there.
Single unmarked trail. Any linear series of pages, such as next and previous links. It's easy to navigate because there's only one way to go. In a replace-the-page world of the web, one still loses context about what the trail looked like one step back.
Navigating a labyrinth. The string helps find the way back (browser back button), the chalk helps to know if one has been there before (different color for visited links). One doesn't see the big picture, so it's hard to know why or how one got there.
Travel journal, recording information about places visited. This could look like a list of names of pages leading to the current page, or showing pages in parallel like in FedWiki. This is a big step up, because it let's you know how and why you got there, which helps you keep your train of thought.
Predefined paths with trail markers. The above paragraph is like drawing out a new path as it is explored. What are named paths with trail markers like in a hypertext system? We've been focused on the low level point-a-to-point-b link, but what does a path look like?
A map: the quintessential navigational tool. We have things like table of contents, or hierarchies of links, but these hardly pass for a map. Most lists of links can't be carried with, so it's only visible at the start of the trail. Also usually missing is the concept of distance. Links look the same, but some things are more related than others (shorter distance).
See Getting Lost
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I love this -- it is surprisingly helpful to think this way. I'm going to try to think of more. Is there something to describe this fedwiki experience of endless pages pushing back other pages? -- Mike Caulfield
I'm not sure. I don't see an easy way to fit the parallel pages idea into the navigational metaphor. When the pages are visibly connected, it becomes somewhat more like a trail map, with trails between pages. When the pages are lined up in the order visited, the closest thing I thought of is it's like a travel journal or scrapbook that you can use to get context about where you've been on the trip. -- Jake Sandlund
Related page Hypertext Gardens