Authoring Large Hypermedia Documents with IGD

The IGD (Interactive Graphical Documents) hypermedia system was designed to make possible interactive presentations that can be explored by and customized for individual users. We describe IGD’s authoring facilities through an annotated excerpt from an editing session, emphasizing how the system’s document model and user interface help support the creation of large documents. Although we feel that IGD successfully addressed some of the issues of scale, experience with the system has convinced us that it is wrong to cast many of the problems of authoring large hypertexts as ones that can be solved by implementing editors of sufficient scope and sophistication. We believe that hypertext design systems based on direct editing of documents inherit many of the bottlenecks associated with the conventional document authoring process. These problems are compounded by the added intellectual burden of designing a connective structure of keyworded links. We contrast the reality of the author-centered, editor-based approach to document design and layout, exemplified by IGD, with the promise of a knowledge-based, automated alternative, and discuss why we feel that many of the facilities provided by IGD will still be useful even if presentations can be created entirely automatically.