Since 1992, the web has been the only hypertext system most of us have known (outside of occasional hypertext systems built on top of the web, such as mediawiki). However, the web is merely the most popular of hundreds of earlier systems, most of which were technically superior.
For historical and political reasons (detailed in Tim Berners-Lee’s autobiography, Weaving the Web), this implementation dropped nearly all of the features that define hypertext in favor of a single one (jump links). For historical and political reasons, this implementation relied upon existing ill-fitting technologies (the SGML-derivative HTML, the filesystem- and host-oriented HTTP). For historical and political reasons (CERN’s clout, attempts to cash in on Gopher trademarks, early pushes to open source Apache and Mosaic, the proprietary nature and lack of portability and interoperability of many earlier hypertext systems), the web won.
Nevertheless, the web will not be the last hypertext system. The features that the web dropped are useful, and for the most part adding them back in on top of the web’s existing structure is fated to result in slow, complex, and unreliable hacks.
The situations that made a web-like system easier to design and build than a Xanadu-style system are, for the most part, gone. Over the past thirty years, making a web browser has graduated from a weekend project to such a major undertaking that only three or four modern browsers exist (webkit, mozilla, internet explorer, and possibly…