I guess the hypertext link is limited in it's function compared to other things,
although a human eye can wonder over a webpage in such a loose manner, indeed
without turning the page. To some people, the hypertext link is the very
embodiment of all that's wrong with the world - deep-linking can be considered
heinious. There are others - Disney, for example - whose sites attempt to block
the user in and allow nobody to escape the corporate walls.
I would like to use hypertext links as a guide though a set of poems I've done,
almost matching the poems (which are geographically based) to a web of hypertext
links which reflect the relative geographical positions that the poems are based
on. The usefulness of the hypertext link is only bounded by ones' imagination.
I guess these arguments about hypertext links don't interest me that much, except
to say why are we comparing apples and pears? A book isn't an hypertext document
and vice versa. You produce to one media as much as you'd produce to another,
that is to say, by adapting to each one's quirks and fables. I think the control
of the users experience of the printed page is, currently, relatively tighter
than that of the user's experience of the hypertext document. The interpretation
of font, colouring, line-spacing etc etc can vary from platform to platform,
browser to browser. You might -think- you've tightly specced everything, then
someone uses Lynx and all that hard work goes out the window. A friend of mine
who is a graphic designer who'd done a lot of work in the book-trade, certainly
found it extremely hard work trying to map the ideas and attitudes he had
garnered producing books onto constructing websites. OTOH, you could use Flash
:-)
Cheers,
Roger
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Alison wrote...
>
> >The eye travelling over the pages of a book can leap where and how it
> >likes (to another book, if it desires, or out of the window). I can, if
> >I wish, read a book backwards (and have, though not as thoroughly
> >backwards as Samuel Beckett might wish). The hypertext link will lead
> >only to one destination, which makes it perhaps useful for encyclopaedias
> >but not nearly as interesting or unpredictable as the connections that
> >can be made in an individual mind.
>
> True. Any yet, if you were preparing a collection of poems, would you
> just order them randomly, on the grounds that a reader could (and likely
> would) flip from one to another anyway? Or would you attempt to arrange
> them so that a reader could, if they wanted to, read them in the order
> printed and maybe discover connections between them?
>
> And if, while you were deciding on the arrangement, you discovered that
> there was more than one ordering that made sense, that you'd like to
> point out to the reader, be a bit frustrated that you could only choose
> one?
>
> Best,
> --
> Peter
>
> http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/
>
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