Key ideas

  1. HTML browser pages

    Hyperlinks make writing better. Write HTML browser pages. Don't write just for print on paper. Hyperlinks are not possible on paper. Don't write long emails. Emails can have links out but links to emails are not possible.

    Write HTML browser pages. They're easy to create. Technical, academic, business, government and institutional writing improves with hyperlinks.

    The main place where hyperlinks don't help are creative works like stories where you want to control the reader's attention from beginning to end.

  2. wikipedia

    Three ideas from wikipedia are

    1. Cite your sources.
    2. Make clear what are internal links and what are external links.
    3. Improve the content over time. This can be done by a group or an individual.

  3. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

    Three ideas broadly taken from the FOSS movement are

    1. Think about how you want your work used.
    2. Make the legal statements on your work reflect how you want your work used.

      FOSS and the Creative Commons licenses which extend libre and open licenses into writing and creations other than text are all about getting the legal part regarding your work to do what you want. These licenses also happen to emphasize openness and liberty in the use. Your choices may be a free/libre license or a very proprietary use like a business trade secret or confidential information, or government classified information. Your use may be something in between like the copyright and use typical of books (you can read the book; share the book or resell the book but you cannot copy the book and you especially cannot copy the book and sell the copies). In any case make the legal statements on your work reflect how you want it used.

    3. Use other works according to their legal use statements.

      If you carefully state how others are to use your works you might be more inclined to follow use statements of others works.

  4. version control

    Use version control software to manage changes in the browser pages. Keep track of who changed what, when they did it and their explanations of why they made the changes. Also create and keep branch variations. These variations can be experiments or derivative works.