The Future of Hypertext and Hypermedia
In 1990 Jakob Nielsen predicted two major developments in the hypertext
field within three to five years:
- the emergence of a mass market for hypertext;
- the integration of hypertext and other computer facilities.
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.