Hypertext

A user interface term coined by Ted Nelson? to discuss text as a medium extended to support any kinds of internalized references to other pieces of text.

There are various levels of semantics that fit into this description. The most common in use is obviously that used by HTML on the World-Wide Web, but in many ways this is the least common denominator of hypertext semantics: links are only made manually, link targets cannot be determined in any finer level than the target document's author allowed, link addressing is arbitrary, and there's no way to speak of versions or reliable persistence. (Ironically, the WWW was initially developed on the NeXT platform which had richer facilities as well.)

Ted Nelson's dream project Xanadu attempted to bring to the world a rich form of hypertext, but seems too ill-defined to acheive many of its goals. Other systems have existed which are quite rich, such as the Concordia systems on Lisp Machines, but these have not reached a wide audience.

Hypertext systems:

Pages in this topic: Abora   Metatext   Robust Hyperlinks   Wiki  

Also linked from: Active Texts   Reverse Literate Programming