The robustness of HTML gives authors of Web documents access to the kinds of tools used by computer software developers. Hypertext shows how programming and conventional prose writing can combine in the space provided by a computer. From the perspective of literary theory, the whole of literature is considered to be a system of interconnected, intertextual writings. Concepts of linked texts were proposed independently of and long before the computer, but the computer has provided the technology needed to realize writing as a network. This writing space is the interactive interconnection of symbolic elements including computer programs.
Printing is the final goal of many documents, but hypertext documents have no final goal.
Application-centric word processing programs implement the older technology of print. Word processors present text using the nostalgic look and feel of the printing press. Static text on a page, once printed, looks just like any book or document produced during the last four centuries. The purpose of word processors is to type, edit and print. Printed hypertext documents lose all their essential attributes.