Outliners vs. Hyperlinking

Dave,

When you and I had lunch at Carnegie Deli I confessed my ignorance about understanding the full benefits of outliners.

Now that I've read your How-To page, I immediately think of news… that is, a list of headlines where the story details can be expanded. But, upon deeper thought, I realize that current news websites will take you to a different page when clicking on a headline (hyperlinking) which seems to be a better user experience.

While I see coding environments, such as Xcode, Eclipse, etc, as a type of outline it seems that this outliner functionality is already built into these tools.

So, my question – rather, my limitation – is in seeing a concrete example of where outliners would be more practical over hyperlinking? Perhaps Disqus or reddit?

Cheers,
Joe

PS - BTW, the functionality of your outliner on the How-To page seems to work flawlessly.