At best, this will cause the user significant frustration. At worst, it could cause data loss or even more catastrophic results. The same thing happens when a user begins navigating in an information space. Ideally, this helps relate pieces of information to each other and helps guide searches to an appropriate location in the information space. However, while a book is a highly linear space with a fairly straightforward model, a hypertext document is often highly nonlinear.
Information flow can branch outward from many locations within the text.
By following a link, the user may be taken to a completely different part of the document, and it may not be entirely clear how the new found information relates to the document as a whole. It may not even be clear how to get back to the location in the document that contained the link to this page. If this is a faulty model, that's bad enough. Too often, however, this is the only model that applies to a great many hypertext systems. This problem is only exacerbated on the World Wide Web.