A “hypertext”

In the midst of col­lect­ing Web links to accom­pany one of my upcom­ing arti­cles, I came across this page, still hosted some­where in the depths of MSU’s old­est servers.

This “hyper­text” in glacial geol­ogy dates back to 1999, when stu­dents in Geology 445 — Glacial Geology cre­ated the site. The date at the top of the page indi­cates that the site was last updated in December 2005, though the cheesy back­ground images and mas­sive, poorly-laid-out, blue-rimmed images and ban­ners still remain to remind us of this page’s gen­e­sis in Web 1.0.

It occurred to me when I came across this site that we don’t really refer to Web pages as “hyper­texts” any­more. In com­mon speech, hyper­text has become an adjec­tive. We might say that a Web page is a hyper­text doc­u­ment or a pro­fes­sor may write a hyper­text text­book, but sel­dom do we write just plain, old hyper­texts any­more. Heck, Firefox’s built-in spell checker doesn’t even rec­og­nize hyper­texts, the plural, as a word.

Is any­one out there still writ­ing hyper­texts? What does it mean to write a hyper­text? Can we still use hyper­text as a noun, or has it become so com­mon that it has been lost to adjec­ti­val realm forever?