An interesting discussion secondary to the emergence of the Web and hypertext media is one of likeness and difference. Since its debut over five years ago, there has been a consistent and ongoing attempt to define the Web and hypertext media as likened to something that we already understand and with which we feel safe, like print media. In parallel, there is the related challenge of reconciling hypertext media with the tangibility of print because of its inability to exist outside of the box; questioning our relationship to the physical and the placement of value on the material. At the center of these dialogues is a knowledge that the Web is both of these: similar to print publishing mediums in its presentation of information, but vastly different in its seemingly indefinable and intangible limitlessness of dimensionality.

One of the most satisfying hypertext experiences for me occurred while I was an undergraduate, before any commercialization of the Web, in a course dedicated to the plays of William Shakespeare. Each evening as I poured through the pages of another tragedy, comedy, or history, in my "Complete Penguin Shakespeare," my left index finder navigating the body text and my right index finger at the bottom of the page navigating the corresponding footnotes, I reveled in the immediacy of related texts, relational topics, and literary dimensionality. Now, almost fifteen years later and as the publisher of an online poetry journal, I find that the hypertext medium offers an even greater opportunity in demonstrated correspondence including visual, audio, and heightened textual dimensionality. Within this capacity, ideas may locate themselves within a spatial atmosphere defying the physical laws of place and thus opening to the possibility for expanded and enhanced articulations. This is not to say that print medium does not offer an equally engaging forum for invention and discovery, but I would posit that hypertext provides a new and different lattice for expression where the text is fused with an infinite capacity for branching and relational spatiality.

Inherent within this discourse of print and online media, difference and devaluation are surprising companions where prejudice for the tangible in print publishing tends toward marginalization of the Web as a viable publishing medium. That despite the innovations of relational correspondence, because online publication is often perceived as simply a digital translation of print publication and devoid of the material value of a physical thing, that it is less real, and thus, less important. Difficulty arises in the effort to define by association and a consequent devaluation in comparison. Thus, in this like comparison, what becomes fundamentally at stake is our general location of value on the material. It's not surprising that in an attempt to understand the Web and hypertext media, that one would look to the referential in order to approximate an understanding of it. However, to accept the Web as a new and different publishing medium, that does not challenge or devalue the print publishing medium, but instead enhances it through qualities of likeness and difference, is to open literary discourse to yet unarticulated possibilities for dimensionally correspondent literary expression and understanding.