This article appeared in The Globe and Mail newspaper (weekly circulation 1,790,862) on Saturday, 30 August 1997

A Web site that deconstructs reading

by Rui Umezawa

I HAVE a very good friend named Tad who works as a doctor of anatomical pathology. I would tell you more about him, except you will have more fun learning all about Tad on his personal Internet page, which happens to be one of the best Web sites I've seen. And I've seen my fair share.

As one who has been reading text online since long before the Web was cast, I've been disappointed lately with the lack of progress on the Net. Faster bandwidths, multimedia, and computer languages such as Java notwithstanding, there have been very few sites that treat the Web as a truly new medium. Online travel agents, news services and bulletin boards have changed little since the graphics of the Web were added, and in some cases were more convenient when they were purely text oriented.

Do I really need illustrations of sun and clouds to tell me the day's weather forecast? If it's necessary to see video footage of a news event, wouldn't it be easier to watch TV than download a clip from the CNN site? Take away these ornaments on most Web sites, and we're left with essentially -- sigh -- text.

This is true for so-called E-zines, electronic online magazines. Inevitably, after some pointing and clicking, you wind up simply reading articles in plain text and looking at photos and illustrations that, with today's video technology, still look better printed on glossy paper. Sadly, this is true even of E-zines that should have the best Web page designers money can buy.

Check out Atlantic Unbound, the online version of The Atlantic Monthly, or Salon. The editors of these E-zines have done little but transpose an article from hard copy onto the Web. At most, you get a link to a profile of the author. The experience of reading the article would not differ at all if you had bought the publication at a newsstand. This is the new publishing frontier?

Okay, Hot Wired, brought to you by the people who put out Wired magazine, is an exception, but if these guys can't put together a cool Web site, no one can.

At any rate, the proliferation of E-zines and their advocates is almost overwhelming for a media junkie like me, and with all the talk, I'm always on the lookout for pages that can do the walk. If the Internet is a wholly new medium, as cyber-pundits tell me (and I believe them), then I want pages that give me an experience fundamentally different from print, radio or television.

I never expected my old friend Tad to provide me with a true Web experience, but he does. And he does so without animated applets (apple faces) or any multimedia beyond scanned photographs.

What he does is what Web gurus call hyperwrite, that is, use hyperlinks -- those underlined words that you click on to take you to another page -- to their fullest. Hyperlinks are everywhere on Tad's site. In his bio, for instance, we discover that Tad is short for Tadaaki (he's Japanese and lives in North America). His full first name, for some reason, is hyperlinked. Click on it and you learn that all his life people have been telling him he has an unusual first name. On the contrary, he says, these are countless Tadaakis who are on the Web, and he provides a long list of links to their pages to prove it. The utter absurdity of the page, along with the length of the list, causes you to chuckle, then go back to his bio for more hyperlinks.

Tad speculates that his father and mother, who are from opposite ends of Japan, must have met through omiai, traditional Japanese matchmaking. Click on this passage, and you're whisked off to an electronic omiai website.

Elsewhere on his site is a diary. If Tad happened to have seen a play on a particular day, he will provide a link to a newspaper review. He also describes his work as a pathologist, and his explanations naturally provide links to Quincy and Agent Scully Web sites. All this is provided within his text, so you are constantly slipping in and out of his ramblings. In short, his Web site is constructed to deconstruct the reading experience. Jacques Derrida should be delighted.

Aside from Tad's page, my most enjoyable Web experience recently has been the online version of the ultra-hip Shift magazine. To call it the Canadian counterpart of the venerated Hot Wired would not do it justice. Shift is better than Hot Wired. It loads amazingly quickly. The animated graphics, therefore, do not take anything away from the text because we're not paying for them with time. The designer utilizes the limited space of a monitor screen to its fullest, so the reader is not constantly scrolling up and down the text, or enlargening or shrinking the frame. The typeface is large enough to read easily. Most important, the site makes reading a truly multidimensional experience without sacrificing any of its communicative function.

The current issue of Shift in its hard copy version lists its favourite Internet publications -- undoubtedly with confidence, since none of them holds a candle to its own Web site.

Writers and editors who claim the Web as their medium of choice should therefore take note. A piece of text that is contained on only one page and not interfaced to the rest of the Internet and its millions of users is dead.

Rui Umezawa is a Toronto writer.