Yes, but why?
Given the number of people who have access to the web it seems logical to assume that there should be a significant number of them able to write well, in fact it is not impossible to find web pages in which good organisation combined with appropriate spelling and construction go hand-in-hand with very acceptable content. That being the case one is given to pondering the fact that many people who style themselves as writers find it quite unnecessary to bother themselves with small intricacies like plot or character development and appear to be quite untroubled when a word like 'there' appears in a place where on might normally expect 'their' or even 'they're' always assuming that in the latter case the correct application of the apostrophe happened by some monumental good fortune to fall in the correct place. Even if a reader was able to navigate all of the nooks and crannies of something like Patchwork Girl or Victory Garden, and had the fortitude to persist through the entire composition, the experience would be extremely unlikely to produce a sense of satisfaction at the endeavour. The sheer tedium of clicking innumerable links only to be rewarded with a small handful of words that often seem to be entirely unrelated to anything else experienced along the journey would ensure a feeling of, at the least, frustration. To wade through Geoff Ryman's 253, or tube theatre, a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash is to discover that its resemblance to any other thing that one might categorise as a 'novel' is at most passing and passing rather quickly at that. Ryman is kind enough to warn potential readers that his presentation is on the light side but then he includes that word 'novel' in his title; an expectation that he then goes some way towards avoiding completely. Instead he gives a collection, supposedly 253, being the complement of the carriages and the driver, of very sparse character sketches; but even there he short-changes his readers, including four empty seats in his total and providing no descriptions for them at all. It might be accepted that hypertexts are more complex to design and to implement, however there seems to be no logical reason
why that or any similar difficulty should manifest itself in sub-standard craft.
Given the number of people who have access to the web it seems logical to assume that there should be a significant number of them able to write well, in fact it is not impossible to find web pages in which good organisation combined with appropriate spelling and construction go hand-in-hand with very acceptable content. That being the case one is given to pondering the fact that many people who style themselves as writers find it quite unnecessary to bother themselves with small intricacies like plot or character development and appear to be quite untroubled when a word like 'there' appears in a place where on might normally expect 'their' or even 'they're' always assuming that in the latter case the correct application of the apostrophe happened by some monumental good fortune to fall in the correct place. Even if a reader was able to navigate all of the nooks and crannies of something like Patchwork Girl or Victory Garden, and had the fortitude to persist through the entire composition, the experience would be extremely unlikely to produce a sense of satisfaction at the endeavour. The sheer tedium of clicking innumerable links only to be rewarded with a small handful of words that often seem to be entirely unrelated to anything else experienced along the journey would ensure a feeling of, at the least, frustration. To wade through Geoff Ryman's 253, or tube theatre, a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash is to discover that its resemblance to any other thing that one might categorise as a 'novel' is at most passing and passing rather quickly at that. Ryman is kind enough to warn potential readers that his presentation is on the light side but then he includes that word 'novel' in his title; an expectation that he then goes some way towards avoiding completely. Instead he gives a collection, supposedly 253, being the complement of the carriages and the driver, of very sparse character sketches; but even there he short-changes his readers, including four empty seats in his total and providing no descriptions for them at all. It might be accepted that hypertexts are more complex to design and to implement, however there seems to be no logical reason
why that or any similar difficulty should manifest itself in sub-standard craft.