Hypertext Characteristics
Every hypertext and hypermedia system has all the following characteristics. I will briefly describe how well the WEB implements these characteristics.
- A Graphical User Interface browser. While the original CERN project did not provide a GUI browser, a wide variety of GUI browsers have been developed by many third-party developers. Currently, there are GUI browsers available for X-Windows, MS Windows, Macintosh, and Amiga.
- An authoring system. The WEB's authoring system is HTML, HTML is a simple, elegant, powerful authoring system. It is a continuously evolving standard, that is very extensible via the use of CGI scripts and programs. There are an increasing number of GUI-based authoring tools, such as SGI's WebMagic, that free the author from learning HTML at all.
- Traditional information search engine such as keyword indexes. A number of these exist, both as existing Internet services, and as source code. All of these are CGI scripts and programs.
- A hypertext engine to manage the nodes and links. This is an integral part of the WEB, and it is called HTTP.
- A data storage system. The basic storage system for the WEB is the standard filesystem for the host computer's operating system. However, by using CGI programs the WEB can access data stored in a wide range of database systems, such as Oracle or FileMaker Pro.