Untitled - witz cultural

20HYPERTEXT 3.0 exist in systems that prescribe the kind of links possible. My initial skepticismabout typing links arose in doubts about the effectiveness of creatingrules of thought in advance and a particular experience with Intermedia. Thevery first version of Intermedia used by faculty developers and students differentiatedbetween annotation and commentary links, but since one person'sannotation turned out to be another's commentary no one lobbied for retainingthis feature, and IRIS omitted it from later versions.An equally basic form of linking involves the degree to which readerseither activate or even create links. In contemporary hypertext iargon, theopposition is usually phrased as a question of whether links are author orwreader determined, or-puttingthe matter differently-whether they arehard or soft. Most writing about hypertext from Bush and Nelson to the presentassumes that someone, author or reader functioning as author, creates anelectronic link, a so-called hard link. Recently, workers in the field, particularlythe University of Southampton's Microcosm development group, haveposed the question, "Can one have hypertext 'without links')"-thatis, withoutthe by-now traditional assumption that links have to take the form ofalways-existing electronic connections between anchors. This approach takesthe position that the reader's actions can create on-demand links. In the late1980s when the first conferences on hlpertext convened, such a conceptionof hlpertext might have been difficult, if not impossible, to advocate, becausein those days researchers argued that information retrieval did not constitutehypertext, and the two represented very different, perhaps opposed, approachesto information. Part of the reason for such views lay in the understandableattempts of people working in a new field in computer science todistinguish their work-and thereby justify its very existence-from anestablished one. Although some authors, such as the philosopher MichaelHeim, perceived the obvious connection between the active reader who usessearch tools to probe an electronic text and the active reader ofhypertext, theneed of the field to constitute itself as a discrete specialty prompted many tojuxtapose hypertext and information retrieval in the sharpest terms. Whenthe late fames H. Coombs created both Interlex and full-text retrieval inIntermedia, many of these oppositions immediately appeared foolish, sinceanyone who clicked on a word and used Intermedia's electronic version of theAmeican Heitage Dictionary-whether they were aware of it or not-inevitablyused a second kind of linking. After all, activating a word and followinga simple sequence of keys or using a menu brought one to anothertext (Figure 5). Of course, Web users now have near-immediate access to the