Just went back and read
Tim Berners-Lee's original
proposal of the World Wide Web. What I found most interesting was his point that the architecture of the web is made to reflect the way people really think and work. It's this non-linear structure that is "normal", not the hierarchical one that was imposed on information in the past.
A quote: "In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything."