Hypermedia on the web: What will it take?

Researchers in the hypermedia field often lament that the World Wide Web do es not support many of hypermedia's rich structuring, navigation and annota tion features. What would it take for everyday Web applications to be fully hypermedia compliant, now that the basic hypermedia building blocks exist on the Web? The following four capabilities are the most critical for integ rating hypermedia support in the Web environment: edit-capable browsers, st oring document content and link anchors separately, external linkbases, and displaying link spans, node and link attributes. Individual developers can not decide autonomously on how to resolve many of the outstanding issues. D evelopers need agreed-upon conventions and tools built upon today's Web sta ndards to fully incorporate hypermedia functionality into everyday applicat ions.