What makes an effective text? Traditional instructional design advocates such design guidelines as clarity, statement of objectives, verification of content, and so on. Yet, as one can guess from the above discussion of hypertext, there is already a postmodern view that sees texts differently. Spring (1991) provides guidelines from his personal experience:
The postmodern textbook should avoid the presentation of information in a neutral language. Knowledge is not neutral. By presenting the reader with a compendium of information, the modem textbook, in contrast to the postmodern textbook, conveys the impression that scholars agree on a particular body of knowledge.... The postmodern textbook should ... present the reader with a multiplicity of views of a given field of knowledge (p. 197).