By now (it is, after all, the 21st century already) hypertext has become a standard part of our lexicon. If, even five years ago, a definition of the term was called for, today the term is viscerally understood by anyone who has even minimally encountered the internet. It's as though the idea existed long before the technology to realize it was available - which is, of course, precisely the case. Even so, we still have to establish a couple of basics. We have to agree on what's being discussed.
Ted Nelson, in 1981, defined hypertext as
non sequential writing - text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screenCERN, in an introductory set of web pages about the World Wide Web, gives us another, even simpler, definition:
Hypertext is text with links to further information, on the model of references in a scientific paper, or cross-references in a dictionary.Perhaps it is precisely the difference between these two definitions (there are, of course, others) that describes the focus of almost everything that has been written on the subject of hypertext. The CERN definition is solely technical, telling us that the links are a means to receiving more information. Nelson's definition, on the other hand, questions what happens to the reader as a result of the availability of those links, and his basic answer is "choices". A gamut of possibilities present themselves as the expression of those choices, ranging from the rather minimalistic claim that hypertext generates a more active reader, to the apocalyptic claim that it is a democratizing tool, giving readers more power over their (reading?) environment.
Go to: The granddaddy of them all, or
Go to: Prove you're not making
all this up