Separable hyperstructure and delayed link binding

As the amount of material on the World Wide Web continues to grow, users ar e discovering that the Web's embedded, hard-coded, links are difficult to m aintain and update. Hyperlinks need a degree of abstraction in the way they are specified together with a sound underlying document structure and the property of separability from the documents they are linking. The case is m ade by studying the advantages of program/data separation in computer syste m architectures and also by re-examining some selected hypermedia systems t hat have already implemented separability. The prospects for introducing mo re abstract links into future versions of HTML and PDF, via emerging standa rds such as XPath, XPointer XLink and URN, are briefly discussed.