Temporality

Time. Time plays an important roll on the web. Pages are updated at varying rates, some web authors improve and add to their pages daily. Others try to update them fairly often, about once a week, or month, just to keep their pages fresh. And then there's the dreaded 404. 404 means the file is no longer there. In other words, the person has moved on and left no forwarding address, or their pages are now somewhere else, or totally gone. Then there's the issue of lag time, the time you have to sit there and wait for a page to load. If a page is full of graphics and Java and Shockwave and Flash and you're using a modem, well you know how it is to sit there for minutes upon minutes. All of a sudden the term "surfing" seems very inapt. As someone once noted, the most interesting web pages have already come and gone. The web recycles constantly, adapt or you're toast.