Small, medium and large hypertext

摘要

This paper critically reviews the different types of abstractions and implementations in the hypertext area and proposes that three types of hypertext exist, namely, small-, medium- and large-volume hypertext. For a single person dealing with a single text the prominent issue is the model of the text that the user browses; this is small-volume hypertext. When a few people are involved in creating a few texts, records are maintained as to who created what and when; this is medium-volume hypertext. In large-volume hypertext the document collection is massive and special institutions are responsible for filtering and indexing material against which arbitrarily many other people issue searches. All these aspects of hypertext have in common an abstraction of text as a graph rather than a line and an ultimate goal of facilitating communication among people.