In the war between taggers and flaggers (this current commercial and cultural struggle between fundamentalist html/SGML-izers and the Java/Acrobat forces), hypertext is, however briefly, lost. The flaggers' concern for the impact of "the finished product" identifies the web as a pure publishing medium and one in which downstream viewers take a place after the finishing.

The development of the web has been as interesting as it has been meteoric. For awhile the Frankensteins of MIS believed that they not only had been revived but were miraculously reborn in charge of things (as they had always suspected they were): "See," they could say "you did need to program after all-- they just call it tagging or applet; and you did need our mainframes and unixes and such --they just call it bandwidth."

Now with the emergence of WYSIWYG html editors and post-Quark web-layout applications, the desktop and other publishers (what Stuart Moulthrop calls the "multimedia, i.e., television" elite), have come to the fore: "See," they say, "You never had the capability to make anything as beautifully as we did and didn't really need to. Come and live in Disney Village, and we'll build you a home/page of your own; we will make you a loveable character."

In the interim, what any first year writing student who works with hypertext knows -- that a new way of thinking and commmunicating emerges -- is lost, however briefly. But because the medium is by nature (since it must be writeable in order to be readable) truly constructive, and since anyone experiencing hypertext constructs the contour of her own text regardless of the [frames] which hold her or the Acrobat before her, the possibilities of hypertext will eventually (even in a market economy) out.