What really is a Hypertext?

The word 'hypertext' appears almost always among Web jargon that is abbreviated such as HTTP, and HTML. What is it? How significant is Hypertext to the Internet?

🔦 Background

A lot of us will never be able to fully appreciate the effects of implementing Hypertext as an Information Management System on the Internet. Before hypertext became popular the Internet was just a vast repo of scattered & isolated information items(or objects) that was hard to search & navigate. Hypertext brought order & organization to an Internet that was difficult to use and disorganized due to its distributed & decentralized nature.
P.S Hypertext comes under the field of Information Mapping which then comes under the field of Information Management.

💡What was the necessity for Hypertext?

The first 'browser' was developed to combat information loss at an org due to people leaving & make information discovery possible for new people joining the org. The org here was CERN. This research organisation has several thousands of engineers, researchers, and scientists that pursue specialized goals. It became evident that with a typical length of stay for any of them being 2 years a significant amount of knowledge was lost with a person leaving the org. More often than not, information was recorded but just cannot be found. 

It became obvious that a Linked Information System had to be in place for anyone joining the org to go and fetch information from. Anyone could resort to this system and gather information to questions such as "Who wrote this document?", "Which lab did the author work in?", "What other documents refer to this concept" and so on.

⌛What was before Hypertext?

It was also important that the method of storage does not limit the way information was accessed. Back in the 90s UNIX file systems was popular. A Fixed Hierarchical System like that which is based on trees pose the following limitation: 

Let's say you are looking for some information and reach the leaf node such as,

ROOT/MANUAL/WEB/FRONTEND/BUNDLER

While you are accessing information within BUNDLER you see that a reference has been made to another leaf, it says, 

Please see ROOT/MANUAL/BEST_PRACTICE/OPTIMIZE/CODE_SPLIT

Fixed Hierarchical System enforces sequential traversal on you to access 'CODE_SPLIT'. This means you have to exit the node you are currently on and start from the root again and follow the path to CODE_SPLIT mentioned above. 

What was needed was a link from one node to another. This enables you to quickly jump to the information you want to dig deeper into without having to exit and re-enter the system.

This is where Tim Berners-Lee comes up with a proposal for an Information Management System using Hypertext. This simple idea went on and changed the course of how the Internet was to emerge.


Hypertext was a concept that would allow one to traverse to the information they need in a non-sequential way.

Tim Berners-Lee also added that this problem at CERN was a model in miniature of the rest of the world in a few years' time. Unbeknownst to him, the solution he was proposing went on to become the universally accepted and popular one.

🌐What is Hypertext? 

It is simply a textual document containing links within part of its text to an external document. This essentially gives the user a multi-dimensional document and explores the different paths that lead to/from it. 

a pictorial representation of hypertext showing a fragment inside a document linking to another

💸What next?

The Web that we know today is built on top of this simple concept. 

Although hypertext made 'access' easy we still had a huge problem(or opportunity) yet to solve. These hypertext documents were for the most part hidden, undiscovered, and unadvertised. Early users of the Internet gathered and maintained their own list of Internet sites. Some even consulted with friends and colleagues to learn about new resources they weren't aware of. 

Someone had to categorize and label these sites for them to be located and retrieved.  And that is exactly what Google aimed for. 

The rest as we know it is history. 

Reference

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