While at Scott’s house, I discovered something fantastic and amazing. It’s a small fact, but one that amuses me immensely. That fact is that this site has apparently been deemed unsuitable by Trend Micro’s antifraud programming, which is designed to cut out objectionable sites. What’s even better is that the category of objectionable this site fills is ‘cult/occult’. Apparently cults and the occult can defraud you with a glance. Especially ones so well masked as a homepage, a blog, and a portfolio. Amazing.

But the real meat of this post is something I was mulling over while working on the site itself. I’d like to discuss the death of Hypertext. You must think I’m joking, posting this on a Movable Type weblog, upon a site I coded with my own too hands. No. I’m serious. Not quite deadly serious, but I never really get deadly serious to begin with. Hypertext is a withering ideal, despite the very acronym which gives it life. Let me explain.

Back in the old days of dinosaurs, Ma Bell, beforeVint Cerf started inventing crazy geek humor t-shirts, there was an idea called hypertext. Hypertext, contrary to what you might think, is not HTML. HTML is a way to format a document which makes it hypertext-friendly. Hypertext is fundamentally an organizational method - a rhizomatic cross-linking system which enables documents to be both referent and referred. Hold on, back up - let me take the Saussurian theory out of what I’m saying. What I mean is this: hypertext is about putting links everywhere they’re wanted, and even a few places they’re not, and having them make sense in the context of what the document is saying. Have you ever seen how Wikipedia organizes their links? If it’s an interesting concept, it’s linked. That’s real hypertext.

Used to be, no matter where I went on the net, I’d see nested links like that. Pages constantly in cross-communication about who referred what to whom. That’s how I found a lot of my early bible o’ bookmarks. Also inadvertantly, how I found the woman who designed my first tattoo. Our pages were a mess of links; we didn’t have any goddamn ALT text, or any CSS to hide our links, or Flash to look pretty. We had some images tacked to a metaphorical corkboard and some newspaper clippings in between them. A digression - do you believe me about the lack of ALT? Well, sure, we had it, but nobody used it. Do you believe me about CSS? It’s true. I’ve been using the web on a daily basis before CSS1 was adopted. And you can be damn sure that was before Flash.

Anyway, back to the main story. The web was based around cross-linking anything and everything, from what at the time seemed revolutionary, to the things we created, most of which seem fairly banal in retrospect. So where’s all the hypertext ethos vanishing to?

Well, maybe it never existed in the first place. I can’t honestly say that my experience with the web is definitive. I don’t have any evidence that the hypertext ethos was as widespread as I recall it being. But I can tell you this much: rampant crosslinking seems to be dying out, outside of wiki-style communities and the more old-school web users. In my experience, the need for explicit description of links (to save us from ‘NSFW’ links), greater insularity on the part of users, and a general sense of web self-regulation has diminished the hypertext organizational mode. We don’t need rampant crosslinks any more than we need excessive bookmarks. We’ve traded our hypertexting for Googling. We don’t Gopher information any more, we Wiki it. Hell, I know fairly heavy net users who don’t even know what FTP is, much less stands for. Why? PHP and ASP driven web-panels and automated file uploaders handle all their file management needs. They need never even touch the dirty shell that’s evolved from what I had to use, back when I logged in through the CNet ISP (before it was a household name) in Danville.

I’m not passing judgement. I’m just observing an organizational shift in how we present, preserve, and shuffle the data that make up so much of my daily life. It’s not that hypertext is a superior or inferior method - it’s just an interesting method, but one we don’t use much any more. Hell, I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. Look at this page. It has links in places, but not in the same fashion that a proper hypertext document would have. Because I’m lazy. Because you can Google and Wiki it. And because my brain organizes the net as a series of rooms with corridors between them, not as a rhizomatic structure. But taking a trip back to the earlier days can be fun, no?

And sometimes, you can find embarassing photos of yourself from nearly a decade ago.

The Deus Absconditus site in all possible anti-glory is now up and running at long last. While there are a few things I’m still going to tinker with in my spare time - namely adding streaming audio to the blog, and trying to get my PHP to spit the gallery out in a more orderly fashion - I think it’s all come together fairly well. The gallery is automated, the PHP runs smooth, the formatting is tasty and good and doesn’t break in a stiff breeze. And I wonder to myself sometimes… ‘What took me so long?’

 And then I remember. Oh yeah. Losing a whole site and 90% of the backend code because you get pissed off is a really bad thing, and will sour you to resurrecting that design down the line. Let this be a lesson to you.

With regards to the blog: the first time you post a comment, I screen it and approve you. I approve anyone who’s obviously not a robot spammer, so don’t be shy. It’s just a spam-proofing method, and it’s more foolproof than any automated system, because it uses my judgement.

 Have fun with the site. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Pass out plenty of wolf tickets.