A similar analysis of the need for link clarity could as easily be performed on Nielsen, as well as most of the writing on hypertext structure provided by the hypertext computer science community. I concentrate on Landow's work to unpick this "ideology of use" that informs such writing not only because his work is authoritative but because as humanities research it appears to ground the epistemological assumptions of system designs and designers.

The sentence that I briefly analyse here appears immediately before the first of the nineteen rules that Landow elaborates upon. To concentrate on a single sentence in this manner could be considered as a deconstructive strategy, but to the extent that I wish to unpick the assumptions that this statement introduces, endorses, and relies upon, it is merely a hermeneutic strategy. In utilising one apparently minor sentence, from an essay of some twenty pages, and treating this as the fulcrum around which the essay revolves is, marginally, deconstructive.