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Moderate anchors, or anchors readily distinguished from nonanchoral content, occupy the middle ground between whispering that an anchor exists to shouting where it may be hard to read past the anchor.

The moderate decoration has evolved into a default web look, the standard white background, black text, blue link, purple visited link. Most web users are familiar with this setup and do not need to learn how to manipulate the anchors. Web sites that use the moderate standard also tend to use the same icon anchors and menu conventions (top or left, drop downs for subcontent). Most web development software provides these as defaults, and designers must make an effort to go outside of these standards.

This is not to say that because we are used to this formula it is the best formula, any more than to say because we are used to the U.S. highway and transportation system it is the best system. But the infrastructure to support this standard is firmly in place. Web development software such as Dreamweaver use this as the default anchor look. This standard can be seen in government sites such as FirstGov [18], the U.S. government portal. Indeed, when designing this hypertext paper, we chose the standard model to draw attention away from the design and towards the content.

Underlining vs. italic and bold

Underlining, while a web default standard, is not the only type of moderate emphasis. (Indeed, if underlining was the only difference in anchoral and nonancoral content, we labelled the decoration modest). Other systems such as Guide use bold and italics to mark anchors.

Web sites can also use bold and another color, such as A List Apart [2]. This stretches reader's expectations of anchoral content. However, these sites use the different look consistently, and readers can expect the same moderate emphasis to indicate anchors throughout the site.

On the other hand, some sites such as Adaptive Path [1] use standard decorations to take advantage of the web user's expectations. Anchors are emphasized with standard decorations while nonanchoral text is emphasized with bold. This allows two overlaying methods of attracting the reader's attention to selected portions of the text. uses anchors denotatively to navigate to subsections or to further reading, and reserves nonanchoral emphasis for connotative functions. By bolding "an emphasis on measurable results" the reader knows that these measurable results are truly important.

Standard decorations let other properties stand out

Many literary works play off this standard to capitalize on built in reader expectations of websites. As most sites use this standard, it is difficult to determine any literary effects simply from moderate decorations. This does, ironically enough, then foreground other properties of anchors:

• Density. Two examples on the ends of the density spectrum are The Unknown's [56] dense rich anchors form a tangle of connections, and The Jew's Daughter [45], which provides one single anchor per "node" --continuing the illusion of a single screen with content that melts and changes as readers use the single anchor.
  
• Location. When standard links are at the bottom of a node, such as Six Sex Scenes [14], they take on less importance and are less of an integral part of the work than when they are scattered throughout the work.
  
• Content. Works like Same Day Test [25] and Joe's Heartbeat in Budapest [49] use the standard expectations of moderate anchors to focus the reader's attention on the emotional connotations of choosing to trigger that anchor.