Untitled - witz cultural

26HYPERTEXT 3.0 rent HTML, permits linking to images, in practice the need to attach captionsto them resulted in placing images within text documents.This wonderfully powerful system, which was convenient for both authorand reader, permitted linking all kinds of data, but it had one Achilles heel:the computer files to which the system added links could not be modified inany way. Unlike Intermedia's linkbase, Microcosm's required freezing a documentonce it had links; adding or deleting words would move the link to anirrelevant phrase.To solve this problem, one had to add a second method of identifying linkanchors in the linkbase, one that required "matching content rather than position"(De Roure, Walker, and Carr, 67). This method has the great advantageof enabling powerfirl generic linking, but it is also much less suited to nonalphanumericmedia. This seems to be the form of linkbase storage that allowedMicrocosm-Multicosm to become a Web application. Goodman explainshow one version marketed by Active Navigation works:Portal Maximizer is implemented essentially as a Web proxy server. When the userequestsa Web page, the browserwill be directed to the Webcosm proxy.Webcosm willfetch the page from the originalocation and annotate the page with ertra links beforepassingthe modifed Web page backto the user's browser. When the webmaster has activatedthis feature, the user will see portions ofthe textransformed into hyperlinks,which are derived from what is known as a linkbase. This linkbase contains at a minimuma source word or phrase, a destination URL [Uniform Resource Locator] and adescription of the link. The linkbase is generated automatically by crawling the Website at predetermined intervals, with the results fully tunable so that by moving aslider one can decide how broad or narrow particular themes can be. By making thethemes broader, nearly every word in a document could theoretically be hyperlinked,but by selectively tuning that variable, more relevant results are obtained. Multiplelinkbases can be used, so that different groups ofusers could see different results,depending on their profile or interests. (Emphasis added)By storing links apart from text, images, and other media forms, open hypermediasystems can place links in someone else's Web document withoutever affecting that document. Vannevar Bush walks the Web. Depending onthe desires of those who own the server, these added links can be viewed byanyone who visits their website, or they can be screened from outsiders. Thecapacity of open hypermedia applications like Portal Maximizer to add linksto documents coming from another site has important implications for ourconceptions ofauthorship, intellectual property, and political rights, particularlythe right offree speech.