Getting "Hyper" Linked

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Knowledge of what hypertext is and how it fits in to the Web is necessary to have a clear understanding of what the WWW really is. Hypertext is a term that describes the concept of displaying information the navigation of those displays. In a hypertext document, certain words are highlighted in some way (underlined, bracketed, and so on) to make them distinct from the rest of the document's text.

This special text is linked to other documents containing information related to either the document containing the highlighted text or the highlighted text itself. When the link, or hyperlink, is activated, the document referenced by the link is displayed. This behavior is often seen in many multimedia encyclopedias available for personal computers. For example, while researching an article on basketball in a hypertext encyclopedia, the name of the game's inventor, Dr. John Naysmith, might be a hyperlink. If the link is activated, the encyclopedia displays the biography of Dr. John Naysmith.

As you can see by the preceding example, one of the most important aspects of hypertext is that it allows for non-linear navigation of the available information. If the same information is presented in book form, it must be navigated in a linear fashion, one topic after another. If there is something you need to know about, you look in the table of contents, or in the index and then thumb through the book to find the correct page.

Using hypertext, a given piece of information can be accessed in many different contexts. Take an encyclopedia article on viruses, for example. You can access the contents of the virus article by following a link embedded in an article on human diseases, but you can also access the article from another link embedded in an article dealing with microbiology. In this manner, the same piece of information is presented in different contexts.

Hypermedia takes the concept of hypertext a bit further. With hypermedia, it is no longer just highlighted text that provides links to other documents, but any multimedia element on the page can be used as a link. This is most often seen on the Web in the form of images and animations that, when activated, will link the user to another page, sound, or video clip. The use of hypermedia is one of the things that make the WWW as popular as it is. People can now have an interactive experience that stimulates visually and intellectually.

The capability to link documents from around the world in many different ways is what gives the WWW its name. Millions of links pointing to millions of documents can be compared to a spider�s web, where many strands of spider silk are interconnected to form one whole structure. Using a web, a spider can move from any position on the web to any other as necessary, because the strands are all interlinked.

On the Web, millions of pieces of information, in the form of documents, are linked together to form a whole body of worldwide knowledge. A link embedded in a document contained on a local server might lead you to another document on a server located in Moscow, Russia. But it doesn�t matter that these documents are physically separated by thousands of miles because to the user�they appear as a seamless whole. The seamless sharing of information is what the Web is all about.