Of course computers have no need to distinguish between a poem, a portrait, a video file, or a chunk of Unix code – sounds, images, texts all disappear into binary states and are only simulated on screen. The readability of hyperfiction relies on HTML and its extensions like Javascript, on the server software and its integral and occasional components that make the Internet possible, and on the operating software the computers run. Thus in the final analysis, literature on the computer is simulated literature; strictly speaking, there is no hyperfiction, there is no net literature. But before this is seen as belated confirmation of the again and again greatly exaggerated news of literature’s death, informed hypertext criticism requires competence both in the technologies of literary form and in the arsenals of code. The true challenge of multi- or hyper-mediality and interactivity is that the integration of sound and image tends to distract from the fact that ultimately, they are all code – and integrated only to the extent they are compatible on that level. As for hyperlinks, they challenge policies covering citation and fair use only to the extent that they go beyond the confines of a web or net of references internal to a text; rather than radicalize the poetic possibilities of creation, the whole tangle of questions is reduced to a matter of user interface design.