The nonlinear nature of hypermedia documents makes them notoriously difficult to describe. Consequently design prior to implementation is a challenging task. This paper examines design issues specific to hypermedia, and describes the development of HANDlE, a notation for the description of the structural organisation of hypermedia documents. HANDlE is based on a directed graph approach, but it incorporates a range of abstractions which provide significant simplification, and which allow the

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... rlying structure of a document to remain clearly visible. The evaluation of a prototype design environment based on HANDlE is described, and range of refmements for the future are proposed. A. Sutcliffe et al. (eds.), Designing Effective and Usable Multimedia Systems