Part II: From Text to HyperText

The "open-ended" portion of this week's lab is intended both to let you practice the skills developed in Part I and to help you begin to examine the "art" of creating hypertext. The ability to include links in a document gives an author new freedom. Text need no longer be linear. Instead, it can be intentionally written to allow different readers to take different paths through the work. Unfortunately, few people have the experience to know how to exploit these possibilities.

What I would like you to do is take a "substantial" piece of text and present it in hypertext as a collection of interlinked web pages. In doing so, you should think about how to use the features of HTML you have learned to make the material presented as easily accessible to the reader as possible. At a minimum, your work should demonstrate your ability to use the HTML features covered in class and lab: paragraphs, headers and links.

When you are finished, be sure to include a link from your "cs105labs" page to the hyper-document you have produced.

I will give you three suggestions for sources of text that you may turn into hypertext. If you wish to pursue something else, please contact me so that I can verify that your project will be acceptable before proceeding.

• The catalog text placed on-line by the college registrar provides an excellent source of documents appropriate for "hypertext enhancement". While the registrar has placed these departmental catalog sections on-line, they have taken relatively little advantage of the potential of hypertext. For each department, the registrar provides both the text describing the department's program (requirements for the major, etc.) and a list of links to descriptions of the department's courses. Many courses are mentioned in the description of each department's program. It would be nice if these "mentions" were links to the descriptions of the courses. In the registrar's version, they are not. Course descriptions often include prerequisites. It might be handy if the course numbers listed as prerequisites in one course's description were links to the descriptions of the prerequisite courses. Again, in the registrar's version they are not links. Of course, there are additional possibilities for improvement. Use your imagination. Break the materials provided on the registrar's pages into what you think are the best sub-units and add links to make the units as readily accessible as possible.

  Make sure to take the size of the catalog material for the department you choose into account. Linguistics and Sociology would be a bit too small. English would be too big. Spanish or Theatre are just about right.

• If the course catalog is a bit too serious for your taste, I offer one silly document I discovered that also provides ample opportunity for working with links. This is the "Quantum Leap Primer" -- a guide to an old TV show whose reruns still haunt the airwaves. Each character's description could certainly become an independent page. One character's description often contains references to other characters that would make ideal links. Again, use your imagination. If you want to get carried away, you could even start working on the Quantum Leap episode guide or other documents related to the show (all available through wiretap).
• Finally, while I reserve the right to approve/disapprove most projects you dream up on your own for this assignment, I want to leave one big loophole. If you choose to convert a work of your own authorship originally presented as simple text into hypertext form, you don't need my approval. Your grade will still depend on whether the completed project shows proficiency with the creation of pages containing headers, paragraphs and links. So, make sure that whatever you choose provides natural opportunities for exploiting the advantages of hypertext. To enable us to appreciate the improvement you have made, I will also require that if you take this option, you submit a copy of the original work from which you started.

If you have questions about the instructions for this part of this lab, you are again encouraged to ask them through the discussion area for this lab in the course discussion forum.