196 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
many of the features of typing style have had an influence on the
word-processing age. Handwritten text has only a limited presence,
being available only through the use of specially designed packages,
and is of little practical value to most Internet users. But printing
exists in a proliferation of forms – currently more limited than
traditional paper printing in its use of typefaces, but immensely
more varied in its communicative options through the availability
of such dimensions as colour, movement, and animation. And it
is here that even a tiny exposure to the Web demonstrates its re-
markable linguistic range. Anything that has been written can, in
principle, appear on the Web; and a significant proportion of it
has already done so, in the form of digital libraries, electronic text
archives, and data services.^2
So, a few minutes Web browsing will bring to light every con-
ceivable facet of our graphic linguistic existence. There will be large
quantities ofinterrupted lineartext – that is, text which follows the
unidimensional flow of speech, but interrupted by conventions
which aid intelligibility – chiefly the use of spaces between words
and the division of a text into lines and screens.^3 This is the normal
way of using written language, and it dominates the Web as it does
any other graphic medium. But there will also be large quantities
ofnon-lineartext – that is, text which can be read in a multidimen-
sional way. In non-linear viewing, the lines of a text are not read in a
fixed sequence; the eye moves about the page in a manner dictated
only by the user’s interest and the designer’s skill, with some parts
of the page being the focus of attention and other parts not being
read at all. A typical example is a page advertising a wide range of
products at different prices. On the Web, many pages have areas
allocated to particular kinds of information and designed (through
the use of colour, flashing, movement, and other devices) to
(^2) The review in Condron (2000a) includes several major resources, such as the
Arts and Humanities Data Service (http://ahds.ac.uk), the Oxford Text Archive
(http://ota.ahds.ac.uk), and the Electronic Text Center (http://etext.lib.virginia.
edu). Online catalogues, such as those of The British Library and The Library of
3 Congress, are also important gateways to resources.
The dimensions of graphic expression used here are presented in Crystal (1997a: 185ff.),
who is following Twyman (1982).