Hypertext, made famous by the World Wide Web, is most simply a way of constructing documents that reference other documents. Within a hypertext document, a block of text can be tagged as a hyperlink pointing to another document. When viewed with a hypertext browser, the link can be activated to view the other document.
Hypertext can be designed to perform various tasks; for instance when a user “clicks” on it or “hovers” over it, a bubble with a word definition may appear, a web page on a related subject may load, a video clip may run, or an application may open.
History:
Recorders of information have long looked for ways to categorize and compile it. Various other reference works (for example dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) also developed a precursor to hypertext, consisting of setting certain words in small capital letters, indicating that an entry existed for that term within the same reference work.
The term hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s. In his understanding hypertext stands for non-sequential writing. To the reader hypertext offers several different branches to assemble the meaning behind the written text.
In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing among scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. In 1992, Lynx was born as an early Internet web browser. Its ability to provide hypertext links within documents that could reach into documents anywhere on the Internet began the creation of the web on the Internet.
The early Web had an extremely simple approach to hypertext: you could only create links from one phrase (or image) to another document or a place inside another document. Browsers, including the NeXTStep version of 1990, implemented one navigational pair of operations: the “Back” and “Forward” operations, which were defined at the currently active point. A path history was kept so one could go back and forth along the path already trodden.
After the release of web browsers for both the PC and Macintosh environments, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the web, even though it originally lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as an easy way to edit what you were reading, typed links, backlinks, transclusion, and source tracking.
References
- Hypertext. (2008, October 18). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
- Hypertext. In eLook Internet Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
- Hypertext. In mprove. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
- Hypertext in the Web – a History. In Computing Surveys. Retrieved October 25, 2008.
