Hypertext vs. Papertext: Don't Fire the Paperboy Yet!

By Allan Kotmel

Introduction

The World Wide Web (WWW) seems to be today's latest and greatest technological innovation and the proverbial killer app. Every major company, and a good number of smaller ones, across the United States are putting up their own home pages on the WWW. The question is, why? Do they truly need a Web presence or is it just a fad? Should newspapers like the New York Times be concerned about having a Web presence, or should they save their money and stick to what they have been doing for years? These are some questions to consider as you wander through my web.

The purpose of this web is to get you to think about these questions and similar ones related to publishing on the WWW. And if you are interested in publishing your own Web site, I hope that this web will give you some pointers on what to watch out for. The Web is a tremendous medium, but it has its share of drawbacks also.

A Word on Navigation

I have written this document as a compilation of individual pages, each one talking about a different issue to consider when thinking about publishing on the WWW. I hope that this document will both extoll the virtues of the Web, as well as warn you of its faults.

The pages that I have written can each stand, more or less, on their own. There is no particular order that they are supposed to be read in. As a matter of fact, there is an implied order by the next and previous links that I use, but the order is meaningless.

The navigation comes in with how I have linked these separate pages together. I am attempting to make this a more reader-based document by creating 4 paths to follow, each of which would visit the nodes most closely related to that topic. Keep in mind that this means that not all paths will lead to all pages. Similarly, many paths may lead to the same page. For those reasons, I have included an all-inclusive path, which will allow you to read this as though it were a single papertext document. There is also a table of contents for quick reference to all pages.

To follow the different paths, there are next and previous links on each page for the paths that touch that page. Each path has an icon associated with it, so you can quickly follow whichever path you choose.

The Paths

These are, by no means, all the issues involved or the paths to follow, but these are the paths I chose to create. Follow whichever ones interest you. You can also jump between paths as you go.