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HyperText

A HyperText is a collection of pages. Each page within the collection may link to other pages. There is no intrinsic "next" page, there is no real table of contents with a list of the pages in a hierarchical structure. Ordering pages and imposing a hierarchical structure upon them is part of the BookMetaphor.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is one big HyperText. The WWW has all the benefits and drawbacks of a HyperText. You can find these in any sufficiently large subset of the WWW, be it your own homepage, your company's intranet, whatever.

Benefits:

• Linking to pages without modifying them
• No copying of content necessary because of linking

Drawbacks:

• No hierarchical structure makes things hard to find
• Pages can be unreachable from the rest of the web

Remedies:

• Search engines spider the HyperText, indexing the pages
• People maintain manual directories, categorizing pages
• Spreading links as part of signatures, recommendations, etc.

Technology related problems:

• Non-ubiquitous access
• Diverging views on layout, presentation
• Increasing complexity of the MarkupLanguage

Possible solutions:

• Community projects such as WikiWiki

SiteMap / AllPages / Out / kensanata@yahoo.com / Last change: 2001-03-03