If intelligibility is the primary problem within hypermedia, part of the intelligibility problem comes from the novelty of hypermedia, but an important part also comes from the understandings hypermedia producers bring to the field. There was considerable convenience to this marriage.
Hypertext linking enables multiple texts to be joined.
Postmodern theories are concerned with the ways multiple texts come together to form larger communications, and how they presume or live out larger unstated cultural forms. For example, like much recent work by poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, hypertext reconceives conventional, long-held assumptions about authors and readers and the texts they write and read. The very idea of hypertextuality seems to have taken form at approximately the same time that poststructuralism developed both grow out of dissatisfaction with the related phenomena of the printed book, and hierarchical thought. This is also, fundamentally a text, and here I mean a word-oriented tradition. Particularly among computer based hypertext authors, there is generally little reference to any mode other than text, and there seems to be a presumption that the methods of text can be applied to images.