Untitled - witz cultural

95HYPERTEXT 3.0 original form by shrinking the text. Here the occasionally criticized atomizingeffect of link-and-note hypertext in fact proves a major advantage becausewhen readers follow a link, they know they have moved to someplace new.The gap that always plays an essential role in linked hypermedia here has anorienting, rather than a disorienting, effect. One obvious way to take advantageof both forms of hypertext, of course, involves including links to exteriorlexias at appropriate points within the stretched text ("appropriate" here meaningthose places at which further expansion of the original text makes returningto the original contracted text confusing).Friesner's Web-based stretchtext also works well with images and henceproves itself to be a form of hypermedia that provides authors with newoptions. Web-based hypermedia has three main ways of incorporating images:(1) placing images at the end of the link whether they appear alone or withintext containing explanatory information, (2) placing images within a favascriptcreatedpop-up window usually smaller than the document it overlays, and(3) placing thumbnail images within a text, often at the right or left margin,which can link to larger images (a simple use of align : "left" or "right" plushspace = "10" within the image tag provides an easy way to allow tert to flowaround an image, providing an aesthetically pleasing border that separatesthem). stretchtext offers a fourth way to handle images, and like its purely textbasedform, it has some particularly effective applications. A lexia chiefly devotedto discussing one painting most effectively includes the image of it as alinked thumbnail within the text, but passing mentions of details, sources, oranalogous paintings work better as stretchtext presentations, for they are nonintrusive,quickly viewed, and quickly dosed and left behind. Thus, stretchtextimagepresentation seems particularly well suited for introducing images towhich one may wish to refer briefly. Since one can nest images as weli asalphanumeric information in Friesner's stretchtext, it also provides a convenientway for the reader to access details ofpainting, earlier versions, and so on.When I first read about stretchtext I envisioned it functioning vertically,as it does so effectively in Friesner's version; that is, I assumed the textwould move apart above and below the stretching section, although I did notimagine the text would appear instantaneously. When Ian M. Lyons createdTextStretcher as a Director demonstration of the concept, he experimentedwith several approaches to make words appear from within an already presenttext. In one version the text moves horizontally, and as new words arrive,they push the old text to the right. In a second version the stretchable textdivides vertically, leaving an empty area. In one of these implementations of