The language of the Web 197
attract the attention and disturb any process of predictable reading
through the screen in a conventional way. On a typical sales page, a
dozen locations compete for our attention (search, help, shopping
basket, home page, etc.). The whole concept of hypertext linking
(see below) is perhaps the most fundamental challenge to linear
viewing.
But there are yet other kinds of graphic organization. The Web
displays many kinds oflists, for example – sequences of pieces of in-
formation, ordered according to some principle, which have a clear
starting point and a finishing point – such as items in a catalogue,
restaurant menus, filmographies, and discographies. As the whole
basis of the linguistic organization of a search-engine response to
an inquiry is to provide a series of hits in the form of a list, it
would seem that list organization is intrinsic to the structure of the
Web.Matricesare also very much in evidence – arrangements of
linguistic, numerical, or other information in rows and columns,
designed to be scanned vertically and horizontally. They will be
found in all kinds of technical publications as well as in more ev-
eryday contexts such as sites dealing with sports records or personal
sporting achievements. And there arebranchingstructures, such as
are well-known in family tree diagrams, widely used whenever two
or more alternatives need to be clearly identified or when the his-
tory of a set of related alternatives needs to be displayed. In an
electronic context, of course, the whole of the branching structure
may not be visible on a single screen, the different paths through a
tree emerging only when users click on relevant ‘hot’ spots on the
screen.
The Web is graphically more eclectic than any domain of written
language in the real world. And the same eclecticism can be seen if
we look at the purely linguistic dimensions of written expression
(p. 7) – the use of spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and other prop-
erties of the discourse (the ways that information is organized glob-
ally within texts, so that it displays coherence, logical progression,
relevance, and so on). Whatever the variety of written language
we have encountered in the paper-based world, its linguistic fea-
tures have their electronic equivalent on the Web. Among the main