HyperTies started as TIES under the direction of Shneiderman at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. It provides authoring and browsing tools. A node may contain an entire article that may consist of several pages. Links are represented by highlighted words or embedded menus which can be activated using the keyboard or a touchscreen. Readers can preview links before actually traversing them. The user interface is relatively simple due to the original emphasis on museum information systems or kiosks. The commercial version is being used for a much wider spectrum of applications such as diagnostic problem solving, self-help manuals, browsers for libraries, and on-line help [Shneiderman, 1988].