Thus, HTF researchers have the opportunity to make a major impact on how applications of the future will look, and on the level of support and quality of interaction that users will come to expect. This frees authors from the linear, sequential structure that dominates most printed documents. Presenting information as an associative network enables readers to access information in the order most appropriate to their purposes, freeing them from obeying the linear ordering implied within printed documents. In all these ways hypertext promotes options and choice. Navigation encompasses access ranging from information retrieval to browsing.
Annotation includes bookmarks, landmarks, manual linking and commenting.
Note that many of these features can be shared in collaborative environments. Many also can be personalized for different users and tasks. Augmenting applications with hypermedia functionality should result in new ways to view a system's knowledge and processes conceptually, to navigate among items of interest and task stages, to enhance a system's knowledge with comments and relationships, and to target information displays to individual users and their tasks. This special issue offers papers concerning each of these areas. The paper then presents a broad range of hypermedia design patterns to help developers using any design methodology to incorporate hypertext support.