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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
if only

Where the work of those I have cited is available online a link is provided to the work which will take you out of this particular essay. Ordinarily and ideally (that same idealism that has informed most writing on hypertext in academic contexts) I would only provide a link to this work, allowing the reader to leave this work in their wake. As I am annotating and linking these works, however, quotation remains the most viable strategy (notwithstanding the Xlink specification recently defined by the World Wide Web Consortium).

In other words, in the best of all possible worlds I would either incorporate the writing of others into these spaces through some process of byte serving partial content, performing a Nelsonian sort of collage, or I would be able to place viable annotations from here to designated targets on external pages. Neither is currently possible.

Quotation and annotation in this manner also encourages the fragmentation of writing (the others' and mine), and this fragmentation not only provides possibilities of connection but emphasises the postcinematic nature of this as a writing practice.

Obviously an issue with providing external links in any online context is one of link decay or link rot.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by
Journal of Digital Information