Hypertext

Hypothetical desk-sized device for storing books, records and letters on microfilm and joining them into 'associative trails'. It was never built.

Text containing links that let a reader jump to other text. Ted Nelson coined the word in the 1960s; the idea goes back to the memex.

Including part of one document in another by reference, so the same content appears in both places and stays linked to its source. Ted Nelson coined the term in 1980.

Links that both ends know about, so a document can show what links to it. Central to Xanadu; the Web's links are one-way.

Essay in The Atlantic Monthly imagining machines that extend human memory, including the memex, a desk for storing records and linking them by association.

Douglas Engelbart's 1962 SRI report setting out a research programme to use computers to extend human problem-solving, which led to NLS.

Ted Nelson's paper at the 1965 ACM national conference, which introduced the word 'hypertext' in print.

Ted Nelson's self-published two-sided book explaining computers to the public and setting out his ideas for hypertext and Xanadu.

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal to CERN management for a linked information system. It became the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee's account of how he created the World Wide Web, ending with his plans for a Semantic Web.

WWW10 paper of May 2001 by José Kahan, Marja-Riitta Koivunen, Eric Prud'hommeaux and Ralph Swick describing Annotea.

Guidelines for encoding texts for scholarly study, from a 1987 meeting of humanities and computing scholars at Vassar College; P3 appeared in 1994, P4 moved to XML in 2002 and P5 followed in 2007. It is the standard markup of the digital humanities.

HyperText Markup Language, the markup of Web pages, whose anchor element carries the Web's links. Berners-Lee first described it in the informal 'HTML Tags' document in late 1991; HTML 2.0 was published as RFC 1866 in November 1995.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol: the Web's request–response protocol for fetching a resource by its URL. Berners-Lee's first version was written up in 1991; HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 followed as IETF RFCs. Looking up a URI to get data about the thing it names depends on it.

W3C Recommendation of February 2017 for describing annotations, such as comments, highlights and tags, in JSON-LD so they can be shared between tools; IIIF uses it for annotations on images.

Ted Nelson's hypertext project, begun in 1960, aiming at a 'docuverse' with two-way links and transclusion. Only partial versions have been released.

Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System at SRI, with hypertext links, a mouse and shared screens; publicly shown on 9 December 1968.

Apple's programmable card-and-stack application for the Macintosh, written by Bill Atkinson. It put linked, scriptable documents in the hands of ordinary users.

Hypertext system of documents linked by URLs and served over HTTP, built by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN from 1990.

W3C project of 2001 for shared web annotations: remarks are stored as RDF on separate annotation servers and shown over the page without changing it.

English research university; Wendy Hall's group there worked on hypermedia and Web Science.

Research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded as Stanford Research Institute, where Engelbart's lab built NLS.

European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee proposed and built the World Wide Web.

American computer company where HyperCard and the Meta Content Framework were developed.

Project founded by Dan Whaley in 2011 as a non-profit to build an open annotation layer over the Web; its tool lets anyone annotate any page, publicly or in groups. Development moved to a public benefit corporation in 2019.

American engineer and science administrator who directed US wartime research through the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and described the memex in 1945.

American engineer whose Augmentation Research Center at SRI built NLS, shown in the 1968 'Mother of All Demos' with the mouse, hypertext and shared screens.

American information technologist who coined the words 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' and has led Project Xanadu since 1960.

Belgian engineer at CERN who worked with Tim Berners-Lee from 1990 on the World Wide Web proposal and its early development and promotion.

American programmer and photographer who wrote QuickDraw and MacPaint for the first Macintosh and created HyperCard at Apple. Atkinson dithering is named after him.

British computer scientist at the University of Southampton who worked on hypermedia before the Web and co-founded the field of Web Science.

English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989–1990 and founded the World Wide Web Consortium.

American entrepreneur who founded the Hypothesis annotation project in 2011.

University of Bologna computer scientist who, with Monica Palmirani, created most of Akoma Ntoso's core vocabulary.

W3C engineer, first author of the 2001 Annotea paper.

W3C researcher, co-author of the 2001 Annotea paper.