What is Hypertext, Hypermedia, and HTML?

There are some common terms that you may read or hear people speak about. Among these terms, you are almost sure to read or hear something about hypertext, hypermedia, and HTML. The following descriptions of each of these terms should help you understand what they are all about.

Hypertext is the same thing as text with a few added ammenities. Like text, hypertext can be read and edited, but unlike text, allows documents to be linked to one another. This means that you can get to a different document from within the document that you are reading. This is accomplished without having to type in any difficult commands (as we will see later, it will be just a click of the mouse). These hypertext links are called hyperlinks, and they allow you to easily browse information available throughout the world.

Hypertext is a form of hypermedia. Hypermedia is a word used to include various forms of displaying information. Along with hypertext, information can be displayed through sound, images, and even movies. You may already know these forms as multimedia. ``Hypermedia simply combines hypertext and multimedia" (Hughes, 4).

Through the use of a special language, called HTML, hypermedia documents can be created. HTML is an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language and has a special syntax which allows you to incorporate the use of hyperlinks and hypermedia into your documents. To create your own hypermedia document, you simply create a file with the information that you want to make available for other people around the world to view and put it in the correct HTML syntax so that the Web can understand it. Files created using the HTML syntax always end with an extension of .html. For example, foobar.html is a file that uses the HTML syntax.