Navigation in Hypertext

The Rhetoric of Arrival

While systems like Intermedia, Storyspace, and Microcosm use various means to highlight the reader's point of arrival, WWW has limited support for it.

For example, Intermedia surrounded the destination anchor with a parquee-like moving dotted line that traversed a rectangular path around the intended point of arrival; a single mouse click turned off the marquee. Storyspace employeds a rectangular block or reverse video around arrival anchors.

The difficulty in WWW is exacerbated by the fact that one often links to documents over which one has no control. If one can obtain permission from the document's author or owner, one can place an anchor in that document. Similarly, if one can obtain permission to do so, one can copy and incorporate the arrival lexia within one's own web. Although such an approach, which I have used in The Victorian Web, occasionally proves useful, it strikes me as basically inefficient and against the spirit of WWW's dispersed textuality.

Source: [Landow]

Navigation in Hypertext Navigation Aids

Last modified: 6 Nov 2002 by Kathy Nguyen Dang