The Future of Hypertext and Hypermedia

In 1990 Jakob Nielsen predicted two major developments in the hypertext field within three to five years: Looking back (from this future) we may conclude that these predictions were reasonably accurate. Hypertext functionality is found in most computer applications that involve text. These range from the operating system itself (especially the on-line manuals or help) to mathematical programs such as Mathematica, groupware systems, word processors, etc. The mass market for hypertext is best illustrated by the popularity of the Web. The timing in Nielsen's prediction was almost right. The Web became popular near the end of 1995, but the real "boom" of the Web occurred in 1996 and 1997.

The emergence of a mass market for hypertext has had severe implications for the hypertext field. A mass market requires standardization, so hypertext systems and hyperdocuments from different vendors can be combined. This requires:

The integration of hypertext and other computer facilities is often still done on an ad-hoc basis. On-line documentation or help for application software is offered in hypertext form, for instance the help info for MS-Windows, or the AnswerBook for Sun software. Such hypertext add-on's all use proprietary formats instead of conforming to one of the emerging hypertext markup languages.
Also, the use of hypertext in education, like this courseware, almost always relies on the ability to call external programs from the hypertext system to perform the more complex tasks like the evaluation of multiple-choice tests. The text for this course is written in standard HTML. Many other adaptive hypertext systems require special authoring environments and generate HTML from a proprietary internal format.

The "desktop metaphor" has become widely accepted and is only extended to include the contents of documents. When viewing the documentation on one command, users have come to expect that references to other commands can be "clicked on" to take them to the description of that command. Systems that do not offer such features (the xman help system for instance) are no longer considered acceptable. In the future we expect all software with a mouse-based graphical output to be able to accept users clicking on text or images and then do the right thing.