A major goal of mature hypertextual history will be to embody complexity as well as to describe it. The historian who writes such texts will obviously have to think along several axes, offering coherent narratives and coherent analyses on several levels before creating elaborate links and the text that accompanied them. Such work will be challenging, to say the least, and it will not offer precisely the same pleasures we find in the stories and analyses of current book technology. But it
could offer pleasures of its own, pleasures of sophisticated and comprehensive understanding, even of aesthetic intricacy. Hypertextual history need not introduce purposeful obfuscation and disorientation, goals often championed by some early theorists and practitioners of literary hypertext. Hypertext, in fact, could represent a new kind of rationality and
empiricism.