8. Sequentialization
The high dimensionality of an interlinked hypertext document allows many ways of browsing a hyperdocument. A novice user soon gets overwhelmed by the number of possible ways to read through the document. Guided tours or paths offer a simple mechanism for quickly providing an overview of a hypermedia document to a first-time reader. These tools hide the complexity of hypertext by constraining the user to a sequential path. The idea of guided tours can be traced back to Vannevar Bush and the origins of hypertext[7]. Bush calls a guided tour a trail and describes it as a sequence of links through the Memex. In this chapter we will outline four actual implementations of his concept. We will later in the book introduce our own means of sequentialization, the paths editor.