Writing and Reading Hypermedia on the Web

The Web is a linked literature: we wish to discover what the authors of Web pages are choosing to link and what they are choosing to link to. It is hoped that understanding interconnectedness as it is practised in the Web through links will enable us to see what kinds of hypertext are achievable using common technologies and what is impracticable. Understanding the arrangement of the links helps us to understand the construction of the page as a whole which in turn helps us to understand the purpose of the links. This paper discusses a search for examples of good subject-based hypertext linking, the linking statistics that we drew from those pages and the linking practises that the statistics represent. We also show how the analysis of how hypertext links are written can be applied to the problem of Web page reading in non-standard and reduced-bandwidth Web browsing applications.