General Guidelines for Authoring Hypertext Documents

The comprehension and navigation of a hypertext document depends on the reader’s ability to construct a coherent mental representation. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the construction of the hypertext document as a coherent entity. The construction of a coherent hypertext document can be considered to be a design problem. There are no established guidelines for writing hypertext documents. Guidelines have been developed, by Thuring et al., for the construction of a coherent hypertext document. Such a document should consist of the following three components – The Content Part, The Organizational Part, and The Presentation Part [Thuring et al., 1991].