The foregoing is a brief explanation of proprietary features of browsers over just the last five years.  Essentially, each new browser, from levels 1 to 6, on both of the major browser systems, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape, has supported different coding tags.  If you wished, for example, to place items on a page at a specific location, you needed to code the HTML page differently for each browser interpretation.  In addition to the differences in supported features through the succession of browsers, the display on exactly the same browser varies according to the reader's specific configuration.  Colors are read differently, even by the same level browser, on Mac and Windows machines.  Despite the "millions of colors" that one might select to display, Web writers know that only 21 colors are really, really safe.(2)  Variations in screen size and resolution, bandwidth, and RAM capacity all affect what the reader sees.  

Some platforms are more stable than others - to a point.  For those using in-hand media (in-hand media refers to those storage devices you can carry around with you physically - floppy disk, CD-ROM, and DVD) the authoring platforms have had some consistency.  It is still possible to read Storyspace pieces done with the early versions of the software.  (But here, too, obsolescence is creeping in.  Floppy disk drives are not a feature of the recent Mac design, and it is only a matter of time, perhaps, before they are no longer standard on Windows machines.  New machines come with options for CD-ROM, zip, and DVD.)  Authoring systems such as Director and Toolbook have persisted, but they have gone through a half-dozen versions in the last five years, and many features are not backward compatible.  If an author creates a piece in Director 5, for example, the work may need to be entirely reconstructed to accommodate the features of Director 6. 

With the working environment in constant flux and the display environment positively hazardous, we might well expect that hypermedia writers and artists would consider their projects carefully.  

Writers and artists have expressed varied reactions to the obsolescence issue - but most of them admit that the instability of the technology does influence what they conceive of and attempt to execute (or be executed by).  Critics such as Stuart Moulthrop (Moulthrop, 2001) and Mark Bernstein (Bernstein, 1990) have noted the absence of long, elaborately developed story ideas and projects.  Indeed, the large project is particularly dicey in this shifting, unpredictable technology.  Full-length, novelistic narratives in multimedia, such as Stuart Moulthrop's Reagan Library, Rob Swigart's DownTime, Diana Slattery's Glide:  The Maze Game, or my own Califia, can take many years to write.  

A work such as Califia, for example, has 800 screens, 2400 graphics, 30 music clips, and an average of 25 links on each page.  Just the text, printed out, is 350 pages.  This scope means that, while the electronic, media-rich novel requires all the usual writing, re-writing, editing, and proofreading of a 350-page book, it also must be checked screen-by-screen - for link accuracy, photo alignment, type face, color, layout, and placement.  The hypermedia novel, then, usually demands a significant investment of time.  In my own experience, though, the hardest part was not dealing with complexity or length but rather in trying to ensure consistency in the authoring software long enough to complete the project.  

As we have seen, during a protracted, creative-time span, the platforms may change at several points along the chain.  In order to even keep working, one must continually re-do the material.  For Califia, I used Toolbook software.  During the writing of the novel, Toolbook issued three new versions of its software.  In the transition from Toolbook 3 to Toolbook 5, I had to re-code all of the hyperlinks in the narrative, since each version used a different system for identifying objects.  Many times, too, effects that are possible in one version of a software cannot be replicated in a later version.  For instance, Deena Larsen wrote a multimedia novel in which the central navigation feature depended on one glitch in the software.  When that was "corrected" in a later version, Stone Moons needed to be completely re-designed.  

Even the focus of the technology affects the considerations that we make - as the Web became more ubiquitous, audiences began to see CD-ROMs as less attractive; they wanted works which could be accessed quickly and for free.  While a few writers are still experimenting with long forms on in-hand media, the risk factor persists, and many others have seen fit to move to the WWW.  

Short-story writers, poets, and artists on the Web have fared not much better, nonetheless.  Despite the fact that short works may be made more quickly, the browser technology has tended to obsolete work even faster than those created for in-hand media.  For those who have concentrated on fairly simple, text-and-image constructions, the damage is not severe.  For those working on the cutting edge of DHTML and Javascript or involved with sound, layers, or moving objects, a Web work can be obsolete within a matter of months.  For instance, Reiner Strasser and Christy Sheffield Sanford's Water ~Water~Water  was widely admired when it was published on the Web in fall 1999.  But by fall 2000, the DHTML features would not work on the new Netscape 6 or AOL browsers.  

Sometimes, too, a work is not even finished before a new browser platform bypasses a specific coding practice.  As noted above, Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia had to be re-coded when the browser standards changed.  In order to keep creating, then, many digital writers have chosen to make very short pieces - works that may be brief demonstrations of longer, uncompleted stories or works-in-progress.  My current work-in-progress, The Book of Going Forth by Day (3), is up on the Web for readers to examine, although it may not be finished for some time.  

The pressure of obsolescence has edged writers and artists into a kind of temporal corner.  The instability of the platforms favors short work that can be done quickly.  Time which might be directed toward the creative aspects is instead invested in learning an endless panoply of software and coding practices.  I am personally wary of experimental software and features that may not be supported in the near future.  

Regardless of their individual strategies for dealing with alteration and obsolescence, writers and artists express a concern, and sometimes a change of direction, out of uncertainty about the stability of platforms and the quicksilver creative environment.  Poetry, prose, conceptual art, graphic art, and music are all demanding disciplines - requiring a life//time of practice.  Media-rich digital creations require a familiarity, at least, with all of these.  And, even in a collaborative mode, in which experts in the disparate arts can work together, writers must have a comfortable understanding of the technology - an ability to mirror the technical possibilities in the structure of their work.  

For electronic writers and artists, the creative mirror reflects the shadows of platforms that once seemed reliable, fading traces of works already disappearing, and the constantly shifting images of technological advance.  The safest response to this spectre of erasure is to write text-only work that has a minimum number of links and employs only standard HTML navigation formats.  This avenue, however, precludes incorporating features that, for some of us, make the field of hypermedia writing interesting in the first place.  In the face of such technical obstacles, one may wonder why digital writers don't just print their work out and be done with it.  The simplest answer is because it is not the same.  The written word has always been influenced by its materiality.  Words carved in pink marble have a different effect from the exact same words scribbled on an envelope.  

The materiality of hypermedia literature, the aspects that cannot be reproduced in print, are the focus of a vital new experiment.  Image, sound, structure, and movement incorporated into poetry and fictional narrative represent a revolutionary form that allows writers a mode of expression never before possible.  Hypermedia literature expands the vocabulary and gesture of language in ways that can significantly enrich the stories and poems we read.

Here, too, we can revisit the vision of Marguerite Porete.  One could have inquired why she didn't simply change her work so that the Church approved, recant her position.  But she believed in an essential commitment to the truth as she saw it.  Faith, ecstasy, and a mission to explore new ways of conceiving our humanity are all part of the hypermedia project, too, in some small way.  

Nevertheless, all of these considerations are based on the assumption that there will still BE a viable platform in our future.

Recto / Permanence / Impermanence / Alteration / Obsolescence / Obliteration / Verso