Untitled - witz cultural

177RECONFIGURINGWRITINGadequate information, authors must find their own ways to obtain it. Thejust-discussed HTML convention of changing the color of anchors indicatinglinks that have already been followed exemplifies one kind of valuable systemsupport. When one mouses over hot text (an anchor), most web browsers alsoshow the destination URL, though unfortunately not the title as well, in a panelat the bottom of the viewer window-thoughworkwith documents using frames.3this feature does not seem toThe point is that readers need a general idea ofwhat to expect before theylaunch themselves into e-space. Help them, therefore, by making text serveas its own preview: phrase statements or pose questions that provide obviousoccasions for following links. For example, when an essay on Graham Swift orSalman Rushdie adds links to phrases like "World War I" or "selireflexive narrators,"readers who follow them should encounter material on these subjects.In addition, whenever possible provide specific information about a linkdestination by directly drawing attention to it, such as one does by creatingtext- or icon-based footer links. Another precise use of text to specify a linkdestination takes the form of specific directions. For example, in The VictoianWeb to which student-authors contributed differing interpretations of thesame topic, say, labor unreslin North and South or gender issues in Great Expeclations,functioning as an editor, I have added notifications of that fact.Thus, at the close of essays quoting and summarizing different contemporaryopinions about strikes and labor unrest, I have added "Follow for anothercontemporary view," a device that should be used sparingly, and lists of relatedmaterials, which are particularly useful when indicating bibliographicalinformation and documents on the same sub;'ect.Such careful linking becomes especially important in writing hypertextfor the World Wide Web, since current browsers lack one-to-many-linking(see Figure 3), and it does not seem likely after more than a decade that theywill ever incorporate it. This apparently minor lack has devastating consequencesfor authors, who have to create manually the link menus that othersystems generate automatically. \iVithout one-to-manylinks, readers andwriterslose the crucial preview function they provide. I find that the effect ofbeing reminded of branching possibilities produces a different way of thinkingabout text and reading than does encountering a series of one-to-onelinks sprinkled through a text.The Rhetoric of Arrival. Many non-Web hypertext systems use various meansto highlight the reader's point of arrival, thus permitting links into portionsof longer lexias. Intermedia, for example, surrounded the destination anchor