Hypertext - the importance of being different
Einat Amitay, einat@mpce.mq.edu.au
Microsoft Research Institute
Tuesday, April 21, 1998: 11 AM.
Abstract
Dillon et al. (1993) observed, when the hypertext authoring on the
web was just beginning to become popular in the non-academic world, that
there is a problem of schemata, or genre conception, in hypertext,
because of the flexible nature of language and the varied layout used in
its creation. Today, almost five years later, the web is used by many
people and there are conventions which evolved from usage and
experience. In the years that passed since then, users became aware of
the existence of other users by interacting with their hypertext
documents and by creating their own homepages. Through analysing two
corpora consisting 1000 HTML files retrieved from the World Wide Web,
this study describes the linguistic conventions with which hypertext
documents are being written. It is claimed that hypertext is a new
linguistic genre and that it should be treated as such in future
studies. It is also suggested that studying these conventions and
applying the gained knowledge to existing academic work, would be
beneficial to both hypertext users and the research community.
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