I'm writing this on my phone as I dab on Aloe Vera to appease the sunburn.
I've spent some time reading about the nature of hyperlinking and how people thought about it from the Memex and through to Xanadu.
It's very fun to read the ideas that people had about ep, 40, 50 and 60 years ago. I'm eager to do a comparison of now and then. For example, I see mentions of creating Trails (now know as Browser History in web parlance), direct connections (anchors in HTML) and Indexing (now search).
I will explore this more on aifoc.us, but before then here's some of the early thinking.
One thing that I find interesting is that there is a thought that the reader creates these links. Yes, there are author provided connections, but it really does feel like we're missing a lot of powerful concepts on the web when it comes to the user being able to manipulate the hypertext.
Medium.com's selected text and seeing what ithe people select is mentioned in text's as far back as the 70's, and I could have sworn Edge had some similar functionality in it to do something similar, we just don't really have a model for this on the web outside of extensions.
The concept of trails, that is the path you take between documents was written about pretty extensively and the trails are recorded pretty well in your browser history. Browser history is tree like. While you mainly goto site A, goto site B, then C, then back to B and on to D, all of the connections are ones the authors have made. We have no concept in the browser of having the user connect A to C, and then maybe C to D where there is no author generated connection between the two that is discoverable or recallable to the user or shareable.
Trails alone is something I think worth exploring more and I think on top of that enabling users to create their own links in pages to other content for future recall would be incredibly interesting, we could mine the users history or public data to generate links and have them recalled when you go back to a page (content scripts that generate links).
Anyway... I'm heading back to my Aloe Vera, but I'll leave it on this note: It's unclear to me if we evolved the web to the optimal point, or if there's a lot more to explore and we needed new technology to get us there. LLMs ability to generate text might enable new ways for users of the browser to link without much effort.