Just as critics have argued that the invention of the long playing album reduced the quality of pop songs, which were not longer limited to 2-3 minutes in length, and that the invention of compact discs, with room for 75 minutes of music, spelled disaster for record albums, whose shorter capacity necessitated greater editing, so it goes that the lack of restraints on the amount of data in a hypertext could result in a sloppy packaging together of product. One only need to look at a representative sample of individual web pages, with their vast lists of seemingly unrelated links and photos of the family dog and car to see that the potential for babble is unlimited. In terms of textual scholarship however, whatever potential for abuse of the medium exists simply mirrors problems that existed before the availability of hypertext. Thus, we have the potential to deal with variants in new and exciting ways, but the problems of which variations to include and how to treat their correspondences and differences remains. There are many advantages to doing hypertextual scholarship.
Cost is less of a factor, especially for the reproduction of color images.
Hypertexts are open systems. A hypertext can be updated and edited cheaply and indefinitely. Users can make their own additions to a hypertext. Indeed, as noted above, there are few limits to the amount of linked and or included material that can be included in a hypertext. Yet creating a hypertext document is not easy.