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âWhy can't a topic be a node in a network AND a leaf on a tree? Or rather, leaves on many trees?â
A topic absolutely can be both a node in a network and a leaf on a tree. In fact, for a medium-sized information set it almost certainly should be.
But being a node in a network affects how you design and write the topic itself. The navigational features of a node in a network are internal to the node. The node itself points to other nodes. Being a leaf on a tree does not. A topic can be a leaf on many trees, but the trees are external to the leaf. You donât design a leaf to belong to a tree (which is precisely why you can assign it to more than one tree.
Hypertext thinking vs document thinking really boils down to whether you design the topic to have navigational features (and to be self-identifying, since the reader may arrive without full context) or whether you design it on the assumption that navigation has been successfully completed before the reader arrives at the topic.
âWhich would then make trees hyper-nodes in a hyper network.â
Well, maybe, but that might be a bit fancier than you need for most purposes. But a common feature of hypertexts is nodes that are lists. There are lists all over Wikipedia, and lists of lists, and even a list of lists of list. But these lists are all nodes (topics) as opposed to external trees.
Mark
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