The problems of untrained authors creating hypertext documents

Abstract

One of the main arguments for the introduction of hypertext is that developing hypertext documents is more natural than writing linear text because information is stored in human memory in the form of semantic nets. There is still little practical evidence for this hypothesis. At our institute we asked the students to create hypertext documents instead of writing traditional seminar papers. Our experience indicates that the transition from text to hypertext is very complicated, and that especially untrained authors have difficulties creating hypertext documents. A possible solution for this problem is the use of an authoring tool with restricted functions.