A Brief View of Hypertext and Hypermedia
Professor Bieber


While many people think of hypermedia in terms of the World Wide Web, hypermedia research has been ongoing since the early 1960s when Engelbart developed NLS, a multi-user, distributed hypertext system (Engelbart and English 1968). Since then, the hypertext research community has been developing a wealth of features, systems, guidelines, frameworks and theory focusing on structuring, presenting and accessing interrelated information.

Hypermedia enables people. Hypermedia, as a concept, encourages authors to structure information as an associative network of nodes and interrelating links. This frees authors from the linear, sequential structure that dominates most printed documents. Presenting information as an associative network enables readers to access information in the order most appropriate to their purposes, freeing them from obeying the implied linear ordering within printed documents. Furthermore, many hypermedia implementations allow readers to become authors (temporarily, at least) by adding comments (annotations) upon and additional links among what they read. In all these ways the concept of hypermedia promotes options and choice.

In a larger sense, hypermedia increases comprehension (Thüring, Hannemann and Haake 1995). Through the process of structuring information as an associative network, authors often come to understand that information better. Comprehension also increases through the enriched context that comes from sophisticated navigation support and supplemental relationships. For example, hypermedia encourages authors to provide multiple relationships around a piece of information, which readers can access directly. Thus, for readers, freedom of access within an associative structure enhanced with contextual support provides a rich environment for understanding the information they find.

Hypertext has a rich feature set including guided tours, recommended paths, annotation, information overviews, sophisticated backtracking, and so forth (Nielsen 1995, Bieber and Kacmar 1995 ). World Wide Web authors, however, currently must cope in a hypermedia environment analogous to second-generation computing languages (i.e., assembler language), building and managing all hypertext links using simple anchors and single-step navigation.

References
Michael Bieber and Charles Kacmar, "Designing Hypertext Support for Computational Applications," Communications of the ACM 38, 8,1995, 99-107.

Douglas Englebart and William English, "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect," Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference 33, Arlington, VA 1968, 395-410.

Jakob Nielsen, Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, AP Professional, 1995.

Manfred Thüring, Jörg Hannemann and Jörg Haake, "Hypermedia and Cognition: Designing for Comprehension," Communications of the ACM 38, 8,1995, 57-69.