The links in a hypertext can hinder the reader's experience through intentional subversion or through an author's not knowing or ignoring the ethical dimensions of his or her linking choices. Likewise, an ethical approach to linking is, I believe, an aware approach. Thus, intentional subversion is an ethical choice and merits equal recognition in criticizing a website. When we evaluate a website's ethos as portrayed through the link functions, we need to consider why the writer portrayed him or herself as he or she did: why did they choose the character or the ethos that the hypertext reveals.

In considering hypertexts generally used for student research and in student writing, however, I find the "facilitating ethos" one more credible than the subversive--even if the use intentional subversion makes a strong rhetorical point. For me, the facilitating ethos appears in a use of links to aid in contextualization and navigation. It does not prescribe a specific, sequential or logically ordered reading upon the reader, but it does allow the reader to make informed choices about how the material presented can be related. Greg Siering, links editor for the on-line Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments, claims that his goal for the journal's webtext's links is to make web navigation a more "informed" reading process. In fact, in Siering's argument "towards informed linking," he covers several of the issues I discuss in this hypertext, but he does not associate the websites' linking strategies with ethos, nor does he develop a critical terminology for assessing the functions available to links.

My using Peirce's terminology helps us lay out specific practices available in link programming. It works to situate the functions in relation to one another. For example, we can assess the efficiency of a link's iconic function and consider whether the navigation of the hypertext would be simpler with a second function or third added--that is, with an indexical function and/or a symbolic function. I have tried to lay the combinations out in a table to explore the variety of combinations available to a hypertext author. I cannot say that using all three functions is always "ethically best," but as the examples on the chart shows, activating more than one function in a link is often more helpful in contextualizing for a reader.

In using the functions in combination, one can alert the reader where she is going and where she has been. One can acknowledge the reader's presence by using the indexical functions. One can build an ethos within this medium by making it a dynamic reading experience which provides informed link choices for the readers. While much of the acclaim of hypertext is its freeing of the reader, it seems that for many of the goals both readers and writers pursue in this medium require contextualized, informed departures and arrivals from node to node. Many readers come to the web these days for information from sources they can trust. At the same time, many of these same people are skeptical of the information that they find. I suggest the terminology I have here for the sake of providing one form of tool in analyzing the material we encounter in this medium. But have I lived up to my own standards in presenting the type of ethos that I argue is most helpful, most "facilitating," in my own websites?