FREE online courses on Internet Network of Networks - World wide Web - How the Web Works

Documents reside on a remote machine called a Web server in a file format termed as Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. Hypertext describes a method for organising information. It describes the ability to link related documents together using words and phrases. When a user clicks a link in the first document, the browser opens the second, more detailed document.

Hypertext has two important characteristics:

l  It imposes no order or hierarchy on information-only random relationships. Whereas many methods focus on ordering information or putting information in a hierarchy, hypertext focuses on creating relationships between information. In this way, hypertext supports the organization of information in the “brain-like” manner that Berners-Lee imagined.

l  It allows information to have different relationships to the other information. When creating an ordered list or outline, you put a single piece of information in a single place within the organization. However, hypertext easily allows each piece of information to occupy many different locations within an organization. You can relate a document about India to other documents about travel, religion, culture,  meditation and so on.

The term hypermedia describes what you find on the Web. Hypermedia is a natural extension of the hypertext in that the contents of each document include much more than text. They include multimedia, like images, videos, and sounds. Many types of media that you find in a hyper- media document can be linked to other hypermedia documents. In a Web page, for example, you can link images to documents so that when a user clicks the image, the browser opens the document to which it refers.