Hypermedia Systems and Applications

It is a pleasure and an honor to write a foreword for Jennifer Lennon's book Hypermedia Systems and Applications: World Wide Web and Beyond. I am fortunate to have been able to follow the development of this book from an excellent Ph.D. thesis to what I would consider one of the best and most comprehensive books in the area. It has a good chance to become a must for teachers, researchers, and practitioners. For the sake ofthis foreword let us combine the phenomena hypermedia, the Internet, and the WWW by just calling them the Web. Well, this Web surely has become one of the "super hot topics", from both a scholarly and a commercial point ofview! We have a saying that the Web is like a dog: one year's development of the Web corresponds to seven human years. You will be familiar with Murphy's law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong", and with a plethora of derivatives or specializations thereof like: "If you are in an otherwise empty locker room, the only other person there is bound to have a locker just on top ofyours"; or: "If traffic is moving slowly, you are always going to be in the slowest moving lane", and so on. Well, I have coined a version that applies to the Web: "Whenever you have understood an important new development concerning the Web you can be sure that it is obsolete".