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Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Links

art.teleportacia.org · 388 words · saved by 1 readers

Let's forget about the visual appearance of the vernacular web and think about how it worked. What were the principles of its growth? The obvious answer is links. A lot of links. Links on every page. Ten years ago every web site had a section of external links because people felt it was their personal responsibility to configure the environment and build the infrastructure. The many-to-many principle showed itself in linking strategies as well. A site was not complete without links to other sites. On some pages links were gates to additional information, on others to unrelated information. The way you looked for information was time consuming but rewarding. By following the links you could find much more than you were looking for. The vernacular web was fascinated by the power of links and often ran to extremes. Sites composed of lists of links, long pages of unclassified and annotated links, webrings or published bookmarks.html files from the Netscape browser. Since the late 90's link

Olia Lialina. A Vernacular web. Links Links The World Wide Web was constantly developing and when we say it looked different 2, 5 or 10 years ago we should also say it was conceptually different. The competence of early adopters, passionate amateurs and ambitious professionals, the dot.com hype and the mass distraction of the second wave (i.e. the blog) were all adjusting the way the web was built and interconnected. The way it looked was derived from the underlying architecture. Let's forget about the visual appearance of the vernacular web and think about how it worked. What were the princip

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