TCP/IP Guide

World Wide Web Media and the Hypertext Markup Language

I've said the Web is based around the central concept of hypertext. The prefix hyper usually means above or beyond, and thus hypertext is like text but goes beyond it in terms of functionality. Documents written in hypertext are similar to regular text files but include information that implements hypertext functions. These are usually called hypertext documents or hypertext files.

The extra information in a hypertext document is used to tell the computer program that displays the file how to format it. This information takes the form of special instructions that are interspersed with the actual text of the document itself, which are written according to the syntax of a defining language. This ...