ABSTRACT
To establish the aesthetics of the Web is a task that is categorically impossible. The nature of the Web is that it engulfs content into its structure. Any image, any textual form, and any graffiti can be made or at least made to reappear in facsimile on the Web. This chapter has worked through the reasons why the presentation of the Web has followed certain patterns and certain alignments despite this continually expanding engulfment of produced content. It has mapped out its lineage backwards to other screen sources such as television and has further underlined the relationship the Web has to the emergence of the interactive quality of the graphic user interface that developed for personal computers. The Web aesthetic has a trajectory that is evident in its variations of fashionable styles: like the personal computer the screen image is designed for accessibility of use and some sort of intuitive relationship to the movement through its layers, pages and sites. As we have indicated, Web sites are often structured to produce a comfort zone of familiarity and recognition. With the exponential expansion of the content of the Web, the continuous effort to structure its use by major Web-based corporations is inevitable. The aesthetic developed on commercial sites often works with past aesthetics that have legitimacy (the newspaper or television screen) in order to validate and authenticate the content. Simultaneously Web sites cannot hold to these structures because of the ethos of the Web for at least providing channels and paths through hyperlinks to other sources. As an aesthetic it is open-ended and constantly invokes and evokes intertextuality. Any Web site that overly contains its users suffers the lurking potential to be circumvented by the user who looks for the aesthetic of the loose Web.
