hypertext

hypertext technique for organizing computer databases or documents to facilitate the nonsequential retrieval of information. Related pieces of information are connected by preestablished or user-created links that allow a user to follow associative trails across the database. The linked data may be in a text, graphic, audio, or video format, allowing for multimedia presentations; when more formats than text are linked together, the technique is often referred to as hypermedia. Hypertext applications offer a variety of tools for very rapid searches for specific information; they are particularly useful for working with voluminous amounts of text, as are found in an encyclopedia or a repair and maintenance manual. See also information storage and retrieval ; World Wide Web .

Bibliography: See G. P. Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (1994); J. A. Lennon, Hypermedia Systems and Applications: World Wide Web and Beyond (1997); D. Lowe and W. Hall, Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach (1999).

hypertext Any medium that can be accessed non-linearly. A hypertext document contains links known as HYPERLINKS which allow the reader to navigate through the document using a number of paths. Hypertext is not just a Web-based phenomenon but has existed in conceptual form since 1945 when the American information scientist Vanevar Bush described it in a seminal paper, and in implementations described in the 1960s. However, the use of hypertext ideas within the HTML language used to describe WORLD WIDE WEB documents has meant that something that was an academic curiosity up to the early 1990s has become the main information medium on the Internet. The term ‘hypertext’ gives the impression of links solely occurring in plain text documents; the term HYPERMEDIA has superseded it since links in Web documents can be embedded in both text and graphics.