A magazine article, given the inexorable limits on space, is necessarily just an appetizer. Readers who wish to pursue the article's subject more thoroughly have to look elsewhere. In the old days, all that editors could do to help in such quests was to offer a list of recommended readings-better than nothing, but still a bit of a chore for the searchers, and with gratification well deferred. They'd have to hunt down the leads themselves, possibly consulting numerous libraries or bookstores, and the more obscure sources might be virtually unobtainable.

With the World Wide Web, such followup to other sources of information should be as easy as the click of a mouse. Problem is, although many magazines have elaborate Web sites, they are of limited value for the intellectually curious reader who wants to go further and deeper on the theme of the article. Most of these links, as Bob Dole might have said last fall, "just don't do it."