Matthew Gray

Morphology of a Home Page

I'll briefly discuss here two examples of web sites that play with the morphology of a home page.

The first is the Home Page Engine at http://www.athenanow.com/engine.htm which generates random homepages for high tech companies. It utilizes the conventions of both layout and content to generate random home pages that at first seem plausible, but when read in any detail are conspicuously spoofs.

The second is a set of custom proxy servers at http://www.2d.org/Proxies/ which primarily play with the morphology of the text, replacing and modifying some of the more common phrases used in home pages.

A third example, which seems to be unavailable currently is the Nutscapify page. This page takes an existing web page and adds an excess of netscape tags to a page, playing on some of the morphology of pages that use netscape tags. An example of a page that has been nutscapified is available at http://hplyot.obspm.fr/~dl/nutscapified.html