It's not true that putting a finish on something is all about meticulous attention to detail. That detail work is misleading because it relies on so much cutting and clutter that goes unseen. To polish a car or varnish a dresser, for example, you start by making a mess; you slather compounds over paint, scrape and rub and spray chemicals until, slowly, the object becomes recognizable and ready to shine.

This electronic text takes as its subject those underlying activities, the sanding and scraping that go into the creation of a large scale Web project. Specifically, it looks at the development of a literary hypertext devoted to women writers, the Women of the Romantic Period hypertext (WORP).

But, while the text treats the literary issues encountered and enacted in the design of the WORP project, its real focus is Web creation. Creating the WORP project involved brainstorming, false starts, prototypes and revisions. Along the way realizations about the subject and insights into issues relating to hypertext were as common as improved versions of the project.

The subject of this electronic text, then, is just a lens for exploring literature, cognition and design as they relate to Web building in general. The larger point to be made is embarrasingly obvious: the finished texts that we find online display only part of the real work that is Web composition. Finally, this Kairos text enacts that same message and represents an extension of the drafting that has gone into and is the WORP project; hopefully it speaks to not only the polished surfaces, but also the work that lies beneath and comes before.