Special situations which may arise.

In large hypermedia systems it is more than likely that human errors will occur. Two possible author-induced problems are shown here. Firstly the author may publish prematurely, secondly he may publish illegal material.

Publishing prematurely

In large publishing systems a possible problem is that the user simply posts his message prematurely (Nelson 90, p. 2/43). Publishing traditional articles is a time-consuming and demanding process. The manuscript requires much work, often being served back and forth between the author and his publisher a number of times before it is accepted. Hypertext abbreviates this process drastically as the author publishes by storing his document in a public hyperbase. It must be surmised that some articles may be published prematurely, making article quality too poor or too full of mistakes. Nelson claims that premature publication may be restricted by providing more detailed publication routines. If the author must go through a longer procedure before publishing his document, the greater the chances he will find any shortcomings in it.

Illegal documents

A reasonable assumption is that especially large public databases may contain elements which in fact contravene laws, for example copyright or libel laws. Such problems can obviously not be detected by the system itself, hence some kind of editor responsibility has to be established for large databases. Once the damage is done, and an illegal document has been posted, it must be removed from the base. Thus it is necessary that that the hyperbase system permits removing objects from the hyperbase.