Hypertext

Hypertext is a nonlinear text structure in which readers navigate through a document — or a network of documents — by following links rather than reading sequentially. The concept was articulated by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay 'As We May Think' (as the memex), developed into working systems by Douglas Engelbart (NLS) and Ted Nelson (who coined the term and pursued the never-completed Xanadu project), and eventually realized at global scale by Tim Berners-Lee as the World Wide Web. Hypertext is not merely a format; it is a theory of reading as navigation, of authorship as architecture, and of knowledge as a space to be traversed rather than a sequence to be consumed. The web is the most successful hypertext system in history precisely because it abandoned the formal rigor that earlier hypertext theorists considered essential.