Untitled - witz cultural

88HYPERTEXT 3.0 tant-apparently in contrast to visual ones. Another reason, of course, is thatteaching involves our livelihood and status. The question that arises, then, iswhy is visual information less importantl The very fact that people experimentwith visual elements of text on their computers shows the obvious pleasurethey receive in manipulating visual effects. This pleasure suggests inturn that by forbidding the writer visual resources, we deny an apparentlyinnocent source of pleasure, something that apparently must be cast aside ifone is to be a true writer and a correct reader.Much of our prejudice against the inclusion of visual information in textderives from print technology. Looking at the history of writing, one sees thatit has a long connection with visual information, not least the origin of manyalphabetic systems in hieroglyphics and other originally visual forms of writing.Medieval manuscripts present some sort of hypertext combination offont sizes, marginalia, illustrations, and visual embellishment, both in theform of calligraphy and that of pictorial additions.This same prejudice against visual elements appears in recent supposedlyauthoritative guidelines for creating websites. jakob Nielsen's DesigningWeb Usability, for example, advises web designers to avoid graphic elements,particularly for opening screens (homepages), because they unnecessarilyconsume both bandwidth and screen real estate. I certainly understand thereasons for such advice. Like many other users in the early days of commercialsites, I've waited many minutes for the opening screen of a national airline'ssite to download even though I had high-speed network access, finallygiving up. Early web designers found themselves so understandably enthralledby elaborate graphics and animation that they cluttered sites with nonfunctionalelements that consumed important resources. As the airline websiteshows, this approach proved disastrous for commercial applications at a timewhen most potential customers had slow Internet connections. Obviously,designers must balance ease of access against visual elements that encouragepeople to access the site in the first place, but avoiding graphic elementsas a basic design principle doesnt make much sense for one obvious reason:images and other graphic elements are the single most important factor inthe astonishing growth of the Word Wide Web. The invention of the imagetag (), which instructs the web browser to place a picture,icon, or other graphic element within text, made the World Wide Webimmensely appealing, turning it into a medium rich with visual pleasures.The embed tag, which places QuicktimeVR, sound, and video in an HTMLdocument, similarly converts the Web to a multimedia platform. Therefore,whether or not we believe it has an identifiable loeic-a Mcluhan-esque mes-