Introduction

This course is the first course at the Eindhoven University of Technology for which the course material is a hyperdocument. For this course there is no courseware in paper form.

Using a hyperdocument has several advantages over a paper document:

  1. First and foremost, since this is a course on hypermedia, using a hypermedia system for this course gives you some hands-on experience with hypermedia.
  2. A hypermedia system aids the user in exploring the hyperdocument, rather than simply reading it. There is no predefined order in which to read the sections. The adaptive courseware offers some guidance to prevent you from inadvertedly going off into a direction leading to information you cannot (yet) understand, or which is not relevant at the time.
  3. In most hypermedia systems you can easily place bookmarks and add annotations. Also, a history mechanism lets you return to a place you visited before. (With most WWW browsers these features are rather limited.)
  4. Several tools, associated with the hypermedia software, let you perform various search and query operations, which cannot be performed on books.
  5. Apart from text and (still) pictures, the hyperdocument may contain audio, video and animation fragments, whichever is most appropriate for the intended purpose.
  6. It is possible, to a limited extent, to test your knowledge about the subject of the course. For this purpose a series of multiple-choice questions is associated with each of the main topics (or parts) of this course.
  7. Given a sufficiently powerful system (like the WWW we use for this course), the hyperdocument can be open-ended, i.e. it can contain "hooks" that let you explore additional information not contained in the hyperdocument, but in other documents, located throughout the entire world.
However, paper documents do have advantages over hyperdocuments, while hyperdocuments also have some specific disadvantages of their own:
  1. You need a computer to take full advantage of this course. Although you can print parts of the hyperdocument, the full flexibility of the hyperdocument is lost in a printed version.
  2. You don't need just any computer, you need one on which some software is installed that lets you read hyperdocuments written in one specific markup language: HTML, the language used in World Wide Web. Not all features of this language are used, in order to enable you to also read the course text using recent versions of popular WWW-browsers, such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. These browsers are available for IBM-PCs and compatibles with some flavor of MS-Windows, on the Macintosh and on some flavors of Unix. With each of these browsers the pages will look different, and when you print pages they may look different from what they look like on the screen. So while the user-interface may show some resemblance to WYSIWYG document processing programs like MS-Word, WordPerfect or FrameMaker, there is no "what you see is what you get" aspect at all.
  3. Reading text on a computer is more difficult than on paper. This is caused by the low resolution of today's hardware, by the limitations of the software used for displaying text, and by the length of the lines.
  4. The electronic form of this document has limitations which are quite acceptable in paper documents, but not in hyperdocuments. An example is that references to literature should not point to a list of bibliographic references but to the actual documents. This is impossible, both due to limitations in current computer networks and due to current copyright restrictions.
  5. Finally, while we could create a CD-ROM of this course, the presentation of a hyperdocument, when not being used, cannot compete with the way books are presented, including special initial series with leather binding, and including the magnificent view of a wall of shelves filled with a rich assortment of books.
Conclusion: The field of hypertext and hypermedia requires research and development in many disciplines: hardware (electronics and mechanics), software (computing science), communication (information technology), ergonomics (psychology and social sciences), legislation (legal science), linguistics (cognitive science), qualitative reasoning (artificial intelligence), standardization (economics and politics), etc.

Before jumping to other main topics of this course, please complete a short test to assess your knowledge about this introduction. This test is intended for you to check whether you are studying the course text carefully enough. The tests in this course do not count towards your final grade!

Readers who wish to acquire some more hypertext knowledge from paper documents should read one of the books [SK89], [Nielsen-90] and [Woodhead-91].