Genre as Re ection of Technology in theWorld - Wide

The WorldWide Web has greatly increased the number of hypermedia designers and practitioners|the people who read and write, and otherwise use, hypermedia in their day-today activities. Through practice, they have developed new communicative forms: a set of hypermedia document genres. We examine the genres that are arising on the WorldWide 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 WorldWide Web have arisen as a particular type of hypermedia document genre through an interplay of the constraints and aaor-dances 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, signiicantly, 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 innu-ence practice, and formulate what these purposes and characteristics suggest for authoring and reading tools of the future, and design practices at the present. 1 The communicative purpose and intent of home pages Perhaps the WorldWide Web's most pervasive addition to our technological vocabulary is the term \home page." As a focus of attention and eeort, home pages reeect a microcosm of practice on the Web. A home page is likely to be the rst element created by a new Web author, and is the element most likely to be maintained, enhanced, and updated over time. We begin by examining the communicative purpose and intent of home pages as illustration of the set of emerging genres on the WorldWide Web and as a starting point for our subsequent discussion of the relationship between technology and practice. It is generally agreed that home pages are an individual's virtual presence; they are a representation and construction of self on the Internet, a xed point of