Commonwealth of Australia, 1993. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or duplicated in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the copyright holder. The following is a philosophical overview of the current state of hypermedia and the directions it is taking. It is not intended to be a comprehensive discussion on hypermedia management systems implementations.
Many definitions make reference to the 'nonlinearity' of the access to the information.
Strictly speaking, nonlinearity implies an order of presentation which is not governed by a linear total order. Searching for a word in a text document, or querying a relational database are also means of accessing data nonlinearly, yet a word search or a database query are not labelled 'hypermedia'. It seems that hypermedia implies more than just the usual definition of nonlinearity. The common thread that runs through most definitions is the idea that hypermedia permits the user to customise the presentation of the information in some way. At least some part of the information presentation is in the user's control.