The effects of linking on genres of Web documents

Documents on the World Wide Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document's form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns of linking in a common genre of document, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file. In a sample of 70 FAQs, we found four patterns of linking: no links, links within the page, links to pages on the same host and links to other hosts. We suggest that links that tie together document pieces simply recreate the already accepted FAQ genre, but links that provide navigation within the document or that link to other information sources begin to extend and adapt the FAQ genre to the needs and capabilities of the Web.