I always get dismayed when the sweeping metonyms of precious metals are used to mark evolution – in literature, the arts, or society – as if cultural and artistic progression knows boundaries as clear as those evidenced by the elements. Golden Age/Silver Age? I prefer the circular children's game of succession and mercurial dominance: rock, paper, scissors. So to say that the Golden Age of hypertext has passed, as Robert Coover maintained in his address at Digital Arts and Culture '99 Conference, is to introduce a separation into a field so new many members of the reading public haven't even experienced it as literature yet.

Early hypertext did rely, moreso than the hypertext being constructed today, on the manipulation of segments of text, which Coover made clear in his presentation by showing examples of Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, in which the metaphor of a monster/body created from segmented parts is used to introduce a wide variety of protagonists to a primarily text-based narrative. Coover seems concerned that what he calls the "Silver Age" of hyperliterature, one in which the primacy of text is supplanted by image and sound links, dhtml and javascript effects, ignores the true beauty of pure text. A proponent of early hypertext literature who has done much to promote and legitimize the medium, Coover is a novelist, and a very talented one, and as such can't really be faulted for demonstrating a novelist's concern for text-based hyperliterature.

But it is hard to say if the choice to predominantly use text was purely creative for all early hypertext authors, or a reaction to the technology available in the mid-‘80s when Michael Joyce wrote the "granddaddy of hypertexts" – afternoon, a story. If the only metal available in a writer's crucible is gold, we shouldn't be surprised to find no silverware, no tea services or pewter candlesticks in the cupboard. But since the early ‘90s the field of personal computing has exploded, giving us much more variety in terms of the elements we can heat and blend in the digital crucible. Text commands have been replaced by point and click icons and windows. Our machines show us pictures, talk to us, play songs and movie clips. Today's hypertext authors are able to use this technology. (Jackson's more recent work, my body & A Wunderkammer utilizes Web-based html and a thoughtfully sketched visual body image map as a table of contents. Jackson's background is in the arts as well as literature, something she shares with many of the newer hypertext authors; she received an AB in studio art from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from Brown.)