Untitled - witz cultural

178HYPERTEXT 3.0 with a marquee or moving dotted line that traversed a rectangular path aroundthe intended point of arrival; a single mouse click turned offthe marquee.Storyspace, in contrast, employs a rectangular block of reverse video aroundarrival anchors. Unfortunately, thus far, although World Wide Web authorscan use the anchor feature to bring the reader to a particular portionof a document, no browser shows the exact extent of the arrival anchor.Instead, HTML just opens the arrival lexia at the line in which the anchor appears,something extremely useful for bibliographical citations and other lists.The difficulty in the World Wide Web is exacerbated by the fact one oftenlinks to documents over which one has no control, and hence cannot insertan anchor. One way of accommodating those who link from outside involvesusing the identifying color schemes and headers described earlier. If one canobtain permission from the document's author or owner, one could place ananchor there. Similarly, if one can obtain permission to do so, one could copyand incorporate the arrival lexia within one's own web. Although such anapproach, which I have usedinTheVictoianWeb, occasionally proves useful,it strikes me as basically inefficient and contrary to the spirit of the WorldWide Web's dispersed textuality.Converting Print Texts to Hypertext. Before considering the best ways toh)?ertextualize printed matter, we might wish to ask why one would want tobother. After all, a somewhat sy'rnpathetic devil's advocate might begin, it'sone thing to expend time and effort developing new modes of reading andwriting, but why modify the book, which is in so many ways a perfectly goodtext-delivery machinel For many nonliterary uses, the answer seems obvious,since linked digital text permits an adaptability, speed of dissemination,and economy of scale simply not possible with print. Maintenance manualsfor large, complex machines, like airplanes, parts catalogues, and many otheruses of the codex form of text presentation seem better served in electronicform. For these reasons in some scholarly or scientific fields, such as highenergy physics, the digital word has increasingly replaced the physical, andthe most important form of publication takes place online. This movementaway from printed text has certainly happened in the workplace, where peoplewho formerly used printed schedules, parts catalogues, tax and real estateinformation, and delivery forms now read on screen; even courier and packagedelivery services now have customers sign electronic pads, as do thecheck-out girls at many supermarkets. Those of us who work with booksevery day and who enjoy doing so may not have noticed that for a growingnumber of people, printed matter, not just books, plays an ever smaller role