Making Changes to Others' Works
There is some difference between hypertext in theory and hypertext on the Web in terms of freedom, most notably the ability for readers to make changes to others' existing Web documents. In some systems, readers can make changes to another's documents. Such an ability to change a work gives readers freedom to have ideas incorporated into a work and have those changes available for others to see. On the Web, the system prevents unilaterally making a change to a work and having it available at the same URL (though this may be possible with Intranets).
A possibility for allowing readers to freely add to another's work is with scripting, creating a CGI script that lets readers add information (text/graphics/sound). Obviously scripting isn't part of HTML, but it is a technology widely available, and one that should be adopted especially for academic writing. (I would include such a script in this work, but I don't control the server on which this work exists.)
Another possibility for adding information to Web documents is with the annotation feature of some browsers (such as Mosaic) which allows readers to make notes on others' pages which appear as links at the bottom of the page and are saved to the local machine. Any time readers go to that page, their annotations appear. These annotations are only available from the machine on which they are stored, but they do offer a means of incorporating readers' ideas into another's page.
Hypertext Theory
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