Hypermedia documents - Definitions and related concepts

The term "hypermedia" refers to a set of techniques implemented to facilitate reading activities using computers. It evokes the possibility of non-sequential reading: from one piece of information, the reader can directly reach other pieces of information. They no longer read in sequence, but choose the information they consult. In this way, they can explore multimedia information spaces. This reader-initiated journey is called navigation in a hypermedia space.

On-line technical documentation, the pages of the World Wide Web and numerous CD-ROMs for the general public are organized as hypermedia. However, we must be careful not to reduce the notion of hypermedia to these examples alone: it is, in fact, a very general paradigm of interaction between man and information. Its use is becoming increasingly widespread, and many computer applications even claim to have "hypertextual" interfaces.

This article describes in detail the notion of hypermedia in the most general case, as well as those related to it.

The article is devoted to the design of hypermedia documents. The general rules outlined apply equally to the design of hypertextual technical documentation, CD-ROMs for the general public and Web sites, the latter being treated as a specialization of the general case.