Bob Dylan wrote in a song:

|There are no mistakes in life some people say
|It is true sometimes you can see it that way
|But people don't live or die, people just float
|She went with the man
|In the long black coat

. I think I know enough of Bob Dylan to understand that this
is not his opinion, "people don't live or die, people just
float". So, I took it to be a (unmarked) quotation. Some
people say such things, or maybe the woman who went with the
man in the long black coat said this. Dylan quotes it.

Now I observed that in fact Bob Dylan seems to have changed his
song and removed this line!

So now it's:

|There are no mistakes in life some people say
|And it's true sometimes you can see it that way
|I went down to the river but I just missed the boat
|She went with the man
|In the long black coat

. So one could guess that maybe people started to attribute this
idea that people "just float" to Dylan - not interpreting it
as a quotation as I did -, and he got tired of this.

This second quotation was taken from a web site of Bob Dylan.

So, why is this post named "Web hermeneutics"?

Well, you could think that Dylan wanted to get rid of that sentence,
"people don't live or die, people just float". But now, on his Web page,
there's another page, that just contains this sentence in isolation:

|Man in the Long Black Coat: people don’t live or die, people just float
|Nov 16, 2011
|people don't live or die, people just float

. So now we understand that it does not seem to be true that he
wants to hide this sentence. It's out there as a /single webpage/.

Now, this is Web hermeneutics: What do you make of the different
Web pages an artist publishes?

Ok, the river might be the Styx.