While it’s useful to break down ideas into fine-grained units, collecting the dots, you have to connect them back together again to make sense of them. A collection of dots alone isn’t much use (although just navigating around them can be fun).
People often get carried away when they discover the original vision of hypertext, which involves a network of documents, portions of which are “transcluded” (included via hypertext) into one another. The implication is that readers could follow any reference and see the source material—and granted, this would be transformative. However, there’s a limit to the effectiveness of the knowledge network as a reading experience. “Hypertext books,” online books which are made up of an abundance of interlinked HTML pages, are mostly unpopular.