Parallels

I was talking the other day to Cheshire, the hypertext cat who prowls the halls here at Eastgate.

Cheshire!, I a I said.

Well, yes I do prefer Ruby. Or LISP. But I take your point. I'm more of an artistic cat. She stretched out on the sunny windowsill, looking at the squirrels in the tree. Why don't you let me do some more stretch text?

How about some dialog? A lot of our critics think hypertext is all confusing, or all hooptedoodle.

Dialog is a lot of work, said Cheshire, stretching full-length in the warm winter sun. And stretchtext makes it hard to get any hypertextuality inside a conversation.

Hmm.... A lot of the recent work on stretchtext does emphasize how it reinforces context and coherence. You can't get things out of order. But dialog works the same way; it happened in sequence, you can't take it apart and put it together some other way.

No?, the cat muttered. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Will no one rid me of these preoposterous arguments? Will no one bring me some sushi? By the way, Bernstein, you're an idiot.

OK. I'll grant that allusion and quotation can break the linearity of dialog. But does stretchtext really help? Or does it just give the reader more opportunities to skim over the lyrical hooptedoodle, which might be the real reason we're doing all this work.

No, you're not an idiot about stretchtext and dialog. You're leaving a method public when it could be private. See — I'll show you. Pair programming!

Cheshire!, I aa I said.