Subject areaChannels and tools
Hypertext is text that contains links to other texts, or to other points in the same text, so it is read along a path chosen by the reader rather than from the first line to the last.
Each link is an active reference: you select it and it takes you straight to the content it points to.
Douglas Engelbart showed an early working form of it in 1968, together with the mouse and shared work on the same document. Tim Berners-Lee then brought hypertext onto the network: the World Wide Web is one large distributed hypertext, where every page has an address (the URL, Uniform Resource Locator) and the browser (the program that opens pages) lets you move from one to the next. It follows that the way links are organised becomes part of the meaning: this is why site structure matters both to readers and to search engines, which follow links to understand what each page is about.
An example
The online technical sheet of a chemical additive links to the safety standard it cites and, from there, to the register of substances: readers follow their own thread instead of scrolling through a manual from first page to last.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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