Language and the Internet

202 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET

Hypertext and interactivity

Probably the most important use of colour in a well-designed Web
site is to identify thehypertextlinks – the jumps that users can
make if they want to move from one page or site to another. The
hypertext link is the most fundamental structural property of the
Web, without which the medium would not exist. It has parallels
in some of the conventions of traditional written text – especially
in the use of the footnote number or the bibliographical citation,
which enables a reader to move from one place in a text to another –
but nothing in traditional written language remotely resembles the
dynamic flexibility of the Web. At the same time, it has been pointed
out that the Web, as it currently exists, is a long way from exploiting
the full intertextuality which the termhypertextimplies. As Michele
Jackson points out, true hypertext ‘entails thecompleteandauto-
maticinterlocking of text, so that all documents are coexistent, with
none existing in a prior or primary relation to any other’.^10 This
is certainly not the case in today’s Web, where there is no central
databank of all documents, and where a link between one site and
another is often not reciprocated. There is no reason why it should
be: the sites are under different ownership, autonomous, and dis-
playing structures that are totally independent of each other. One
site’s designer may incorporate links to other sites, but there is no
way in which the owners of those sites know that a link has been
made to them (though the obligation to seek permission seems
to be growing) and no obligation on them to return the compli-
ment. Nor does the existence of a link mean that it is achievable –
as everyone knows who has encountered the mortuarial black type
informing them that a connection could not be made. Some servers
refuse access; some sites refuse access. Owners may remove pages
from their site, or close a site down, without telling anyone else –
what is sometimes called ‘link rot’. They may change its location or
itsname.Whateverthecause,theresultisa‘deadlink’–anavigation
link to nowhere.

(^10) Jackson (1997). See also Bolter (1991).