Toward support for hypermedia on the World Wide Web

As organizations rush to embrace the World Wide Web as their primary application infrastructure, they should not bypass the benefit of hypermedia support. The Web's infrastructure can serve as an interface to all interactive applications and, over time, will become the graphical user interface model for new applications. Ubiquitous hypermedia support should become the jewel of the Web environment. Through Web integration, hypermedia could become an integral part of every interactive application. With the proper tools to support hypermedia in Web application development, it will become second nature for developers and individual authors to provide supplemental links and hypermedia navigation. However, as organizations adopt the Web as their primary application infrastructure, designers may use Java and other tools to recreate current application functionality, and not take advantage of the Web's hypermedia-augmented infrastructure. If users, designers, MIS departments and organizations don't demand hypermedia support, hypermedia may get lost in the frenzy of Web integration.