Hamlet On The Holodeck / quote 22 of 23
Hypertext fiction: lexias and hyperlinks
The accessibility of the World Wide Web has introduced a growing audience to hypertext fiction. Hypertext is a set of documents of any kind (images, texts, charts, tables, video clips) connected to one another by links. Stories written in hypertext can be divided into scrolling "pages" (as they are on the World Wide Web) or screen-size "cards" (as they are on a Hypercard stack), but they are best thought of as segmented into generic chunks of information called "lexias" (or reading units). [...] But screen-based pages and cards become lexias: they occupy a virtual space in which they can be preceded by, followed by, and placed next to an infinite number of other lexias. Lexias are often connected to one another with "hyperlinks" (or "hot words"), that is, words that are displayed in color to alert the reader/viewer that they lead somewhere else. [...] Stories written in hypertext generally have more than one entry point, many internal branches, and no clear ending. Like the multiform life stories imagined by Borges and Lightman, hypertext narratives are intricate, many-threaded webs.