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It is necessary to lament the absence of Paul Otlet from the aforementioned group of scientists because this
Belgian author exhibited in his work [Otlet 34], 11 years before Bush, an exceptional clairvoyance bordering
on prophecy . It is for this reason that this section uses the ideas of these four pioniers of hypertext to exhibit
three essential elements that characterise and justify the fact that the word ‘hypertext’ means etymologicaly
‘more than’ ‘text’.
The Gift of Ubiquity
Noting that the number of books and documents increases every day, [Otlet 34] proposes, in order to confront
this deluge of information, the creation of ‘bibliology’, a science and general technique for documentation. The
creation of this science would necessitate “a set of interlinked machines” having to perform seven operations of
which “the establishment of documents in such a manner that each piece of data has its own individuality and
in its relations with other data, it must be called anywhere that it is required” (operation 3) and “automatic
access to consulted documents” (operation 6). It is obviously possible to note that these four authors shared the
same preoccupation : the organisation of literature on a large scale, support for knowledge accumulated across
the centuries, in order to make access easy and quick to that which is being manipulated. Within the projects
Memex and Augment, the aim is to help the researchers with their reseach documents. The aim of the Xanadu
project is slightly different, its aim being the construction of an immense network that takes into account all the
available documentation ever published.
It is possible that these human and ambitious aspirations are themselves cemented within the Web. Indeed, the
Web plays the role of a global library, giving its users a flexible and immediate access to a set of documents
that are spread worldwide. Thus, the Web gives the impression that the user is consulting a unique document
although, in reality, the user is visiting several separated servers throughout the world. Due to the
dematerialisation of documents and abolishment of the notions of distance and time, the Web offers amazing
possibilities, by using simple electronic clicking, to be everywhere at once. It should be noted that Engelbart, by
the invention of the ‘mouse’ and experimentation with multi-windowed screens, has greatly contributed to an
instantaneous and associative displacement within the jungle of information. In other terms, this displacement
inspires, as wished for by [Bush 45], our natural manner of thinking “As ( We May Think”).
The Omnipotence
[Otlet 34] mentions a second essential principle for the concept of hypertext. It concerns the “presentation of
documents, either by viewing directly or through the intermediary of a machine that has to make additional
inscriptions” (operation 6) and the “mecanical manipulation, at will, of all the recorded data, in order to obtain
new combinations of facts, and new relationships between ideas” (operation 7). Within this outlook, the user is
no longer only passive, content to consult elements of information connected by active links, but active as well,
in the sense that the user has available these elements in order to add annotations and personal links to them.
This is the reason why the boundary between the author and reader has a tendancy to disappear since the
reader benefits from a freedom comparable to that of a sculptor who is allowed to model, at will, using the
material that is initially given.
On the Web, a non computer-literate user unfortunately can not exercise this freedom of action on the
documents. Indeed, the creation of one link for the user, for example, is neither natural nor convivial because it
is necessary to have minimal knowledge of the following : (i) directories and files, (ii) text editors, and above
all (iii) the language HTML (HyperText Markup Language) [Morris 95] that is used to describe the documents.
This creation of the relation can be considered as an important intellectual act since it constitutes, for its
author, an argumentative and rhetorical element.
The Omniscience