Hypertext, Hypermedia

Abstract

Vannevar Bush first formulated the idea of a system where individual text passages could be linked to each other to form networked documents. The idea was further developed and adapted to the digital computer environment. Theodore Nelson defined “hypertext” as a collection of text chunks connected with links, and which offered the reader a choice in which order to follow the links. Hypermedia is an extension of hypertext, where the linked content may take any audiovisual form. Hypertext frees the author of the linear logic of regular text, and also gives the reader the freedom to choose which parts of the document, and in which order, to read. Claims have been made that hypertext is the most general form of writing, and there is a body of creative writing experimenting with hypertext. The World Wide Web is based on hypertextual structure embodied in the hypertext markup language (HTML) and the hypertext transfer protocol (http).