We have illustrated how our approach allows for defining both the syntactical and operational characteristics of documents. Moreover, the components provided by our framework, the hush library and its extensions, support the development of Web-aware applications in a modular and extensible way. As such, our framework provides a starting point for discovering suitable high-level abstractions for integrating multimedia and advanced linking support. However, much more research is needed for realizing adequate facilities for addressing, linking, synchronization and scheduling, and user interaction. Nevertheless, by illustrating the joint development of both syntactical and operational abstractions, we have indicated the first steps of what we consider to be a promising route.