It's certainly the graphics that wow people when they first see Netscape, and it's not so very surprising that the multimedia possibilities of the WWW have attracted so much attention in the last few months. But the real strength of the medium in the long run is in its hypertext possibilities --the capacity to link to elucidations and tangents and related subjects, and to facilitate non-linear approaches to texts.

So we should spend a bit of time considering how to handle text in the setting of Web documents, especially since much of what we'd like to present starts out as unadorned text, generally in the form of text files created with word processing software like Word Perfect and Microsoft Word. The word processing revolution of the last decade gave authors control over the appearance of their documents, allowing bolding and italics and shifts of font. The ease with which a document could be edited and reprinted has improved the quality of writing (some would disagree). The laser printer put desktop publishing into people's hands, and a return to pica elite on a manual typewriter is unthinkable for most.

But how does one move from a Word Perfect document on a floppy disk to a marked up (HTML'd?) hypertext? There are programs that are capable of translating word processor files into HTML, inserting the HTML tags in the appropriate places, but I think it's important to learn the manual process of translation --partly because the translators aren't really all that good yet, partly because I think the Web author should have an appreciation for what's going on behind the scenes to make and alter a Web document, and partly because (I confess) I've never explored the use of translators myself. They might be VERY useful if you have a lot of word-processed text that you want to convert to HTML, but are probably less important if your HTML projects are less grandiose.

One thing is clear: you can't just put a Word Perfect document onto the Web without 'translating' it --the formatting information that Word Perfect puts into a document and the format in which the document is saved are both incompatible with the ASCII (American Standard for Computer Information Interchange) world of HTML. The first step in moving a document to the Web is to save it as text only --variously called ASCII, DOS text, vanilla... An ASCII text can be ftp'd to Liberty in much the same way as we moved the .gif files, using Fetch (in the Mac world) or FTP Access (in the Windows world). Once the text is on Liberty it can be edited with pico --HTML tags can be added to control its appearance and link it to other texts.

These days I do much of my writing directly in HTML (using pico as my word processor), since many of the things I write are Web documents before they're anything else and I'm as likely to take tags out of HTML documents to turn them into Word or Word Perfect as I am to go in the other direction. One handy trick for putting together a text using pico is the use of ^r --the 'read file' command which allows you to insert a file from Liberty into the document you're editing. Thus, you can gather bits of text together in your Liberty file space and then assemble them into a single document.

There are HTML Editors for the Mac and Windows and X-Windows worlds, many of them WYSIWYG, that take a lot of the manual work of typing tags out of the composition process. Some names you may encounter: HoTMetaL (for Windows and UNIX), HTML Editor (for Mac). Personally I haven't found these congenial --too much time to learn them when I already know how to do the HTML from scratch-- but they might be quite useful if you're less inclined than I toward fiddling with tags.