The term ‘texture’ is often applied beyond the tactile, to describe visual and aural qualities. While tactile, visual and aural texture have been studied separately in various fields, the relationships between them remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, this article proposes parameters for describing tactile surface texture and visual texture, and compares their meaning-making potential. The authors argue that, as new technologies increasingly limit the role of tactile experience and expand the importance of the visual, there is a growing need to study the influence of ubiquitous technologies on our use and understanding of the semiotic potential of resources such as texture. They hypothesize about this influence by reviewing the presentation of texture as a fill option for shapes and backgrounds in Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows from 1992 to 2007.

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Website hierarchy is a central principle for organizing information in websites with implications for user orientation on the Web. Employing websites for children as case studies, this paper proposes a conceptualization of website hierarchy developed by adapting a tool from systemic functional linguistics to the analysis of websites. This new conceptualization draws on the strengths and reconciles the differences of existing ones in order to reflect the fluidity of websites as hypermedia texts on the WWW and the role that the interaction between content organization, webpage and navigation design plays in revealing a website's hierarchical organization and thereby orienting users within it.

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