FOR a thoroughly modern word, hypertext has surprisingly ancient antecedents. Contrary to what you might think, it鈥檚 not exclusively a device of the World Wide Web, but has been around in one form or another for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
What is hypertext? Put simply, it is a way of displaying and cross-referencing documents containing words, pictures, sound or any combination of these in such a way that the viewer can navigate between them with ease. A thesaurus is a good example. Peter Roget, the 19th-century lexicographer who completed the world鈥檚 first thesaurus in 1805, is sometimes credited with being a pioneer of hypertext. An even older system of cross-referencing is found in the Talmud, the sacred writings of orthodox Judaism, which dates from the 3rd century AD.
What about the modern incarnation of hypertext? This dates from 1945 when Vannevar Bush, an American engineer and government science administrator during the second world war, wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly mapping out his vision of science in post-war America. Bush鈥檚 idea was that physicists should focus on making human knowledge more accessible, perhaps by developing encyclopedias with cross-references that would allow readers to pursue any route through them. If that sounds familiar it鈥檚 because online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia bear a remarkable resemblance to Bush鈥檚 vision.
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鈥淎n early form of hypertext dates from the 3rd century AD鈥�
The idea profoundly affected the thinking of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, the men widely credited with inventing modern hypertext. Nelson coined the word hypertext in 1963 while working on ways to make computers more accessible at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Later in the 1960s Engelbart, who also invented the computer mouse, experimented with hypertext using so-called hyperlinks to navigate between articles. Today hypertext and hyperlinks are the glue that holds the internet together. Engelbart and Nelson are both involved with a new project called Hyperwords, which aims to make every word on a web page interactive, allowing users to click on a piece of text and immediately Google it, browse it on Wikipedia, email it, translate it and so on (see ).
The key to this kind of capability is a technology called XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which describes information in a way that computers can read. It means that with the right software, you can choose which information to make use of and how to process it. The implications are enormous. XML will allow intelligent software to hunt through web pages for exactly the information you are after, not just for pages containing the words you are interested in, as today鈥檚 search engines do. Want a hotel room in San Francisco for less than $90 next month or a podcast on beetle collecting in Indonesia? XML will help you do it. Not bad for an ancient idea.
