What is Hypertext and Hypermedia?

Anyone using any sort of online help system (like Macintosh HyperCard or Microsoft Windows Help) will already be familiar with a fundamental component of the Web - Hypertext.

The idea here is that instead of following text in a liner fashion (like a book), you can at many points skip from one place to another, go forward or back, get much more detail on the current topic, change direction and navigate in any way that you desire.

• Hypertext - Hypertext is basically the same as regular text - it can be stored, read, searched, or edited - with an important exception: hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.
• Hypermedia - Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext. Hypermedia documents contain links not only to other pieces of text, but also to other forms of media - sounds, images, and movies. Images themselves can be selected to link to sounds or documents. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations. Hypermedia simply combines hypertext and multimedia.

Some examples of Hypermedia might be:

• You are reading a text on the Japanese language. You select a Japanese phrase, then hear the phrase as spoken in the native tongue.
• You are viewing a company's floor plan, you select an office by clicking on a room. The employee's name and picture appears with a list of their current projects.
• You are a law student studying the California Revised Statutes. By selecting a passage, you find precedents from a 1920 Supreme Court ruling stored at Cornell. Cross-referenced hyperlinks allow you to view any one of 500 related cases with audio annotations.

Last modified: Sun May 7 15:51:03 1995