ABSTRACT
In this chapter, writing for the Web and the credibility of information on the Web are compared with writing for and credibility in traditional print media. Web users do not merely read online content, they interact with it, because unlike print media, online media are not static or one-way, or at least they shouldn’t be. Hypertext allows this interaction, or “reading,” to be nonhierarchical and non-linear, more like entering a matrix and moving around within it than reading left to right, line by line. “Writers of hypertext . . . might be described as the designers and builders of an information ‘space’ to be explored by their readers,” Carolyn Dowling wrote in 1999, when new media were in fact new. Interactivity, multimedia, space-building and the credibility of these information spaces are the emphases here. HTML and XHTML, the languages of Web page construction, are also introduced.
