For all the love hypertext receives, I have a great gripe against it: learning through hypertext requires breadth first search over a sea of links. Documents provide a single-hop link, and it is the reader's job to keep jumping through links until finding all the pieces needed. DITA is a document format that encourages reuse of document snippets. I think reuse is good in moderation but as much as I'd love each document to be as self-contained as possible, repetition generates extra work for the reader of skipping known pieces (imagine a book where each chapter had 50% repeated paragraphs...). If repetition is involved, it would be nice to track which snippets I've already seen, and possible hide them. In general, I'd rather authors provided a trail of links (so the extra hops along documents) to cut the search space. It would also be nice to have better "memory" of the places I visited. Currently browsers simply change the color of visited links, but I'd love to know which "trails" that link belonged to, how long ago I visited, etc. In short, I'd like the experience of navigating hypertext to feel like I have a mentor next to me pointing me to relevant places, encouraging me to not worry about the sea of irrelevant information, etc.

learnawesome.org I think they are building something you are looking for. Though it is community driven and opensource, so not sure of the quality of links. (one PR I did, that's my association with it)

I think you're blaming the wrong level of abstraction. Links are a mechanism, and writing linear prose is a mechanism. Teaching by non-interactive writing alone is hard no matter what mechanisms you use. Nothing will ever make it easy to bridge the gap between minds, transmit a complex model from one mind to another.

Nyxt (https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/) explicitly stores your browsing history as a tree. Hacking in some more metadata is probably pretty simple, and then some tooling on top for querying it

nyxt is a great find! thank you for sharing

I think I get what you mean Kartik, that suboptimal knowledge transmission is not necessarily a problem of the medium (Hypertext). My point specifically about hypertext though is that authors of specific materials could point readers to specific parts of a "trail" to help them cut to the chase. An author could draw a map spanning more than a single "hop" to the next document. Things like nyxt can help me keep track of my own steps, which is pretty cool. There are some standards for more powerful links that never got traction(xpointer/xlink). There's also https://web.hypothes.is/ (web annotation). This last one could work for what I'm talking about since annotations are based on RDF, arbitrary arrows can be drawn in any direction.

I've always found semantic-web mechanisms to be concerned with 0.001% use cases nobody will ever care about. But perhaps people in glass houses trying to make device drivers easy to understand shouldn't throw stones.

oh snap