Genre as Reflection of Technology in the World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web has greatly increased the number of hypermedia designers and practitioners|the people who read and write, and otherwise use, hypermedia in their day-to-day activities. Through practice, they have developed new communicative forms: a set of hypermedia document genres. We examine the genres that are arising on the World-Wide Web as a foil for discussing the interaction between hypermedia design practice, hypermedia technology, and the types of hyperdocuments that evolve. The Web creates a particularly fertile environment for looking at such interactions, since the technology is familiar, examples abound, and evolution is rapid. Home pages on the World-Wide Web have arisen as a particular type of hypermedia document genre through an interplay of the constraints and a ordances of a particular constellation of technologies (the Internet, the Web, and HTML) and the needs and practices of on-line communities. The form is necessarily emergent, since there is no clear single predecessor for home pages, but rather a number of borrowed types, confounded by the characteristics of the new technology. As Nunberg has discussed with respect to electronic newspapers [Nun93], genres both mold their environment and, signi cantly, alter the views others have of their environment. In this paper, we sort out the communicative purpose and intent of home pages, examine how the characteristics of the medium and the technology in uence practice, and formulate what these purposes and characteristics suggest for authoring and reading tools of the future, and design practices at the present.