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<title>The Idea of Hypertext</title>
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<h1 style="text-align: center; color: rgb(128,32,83);
font-family: sans-serif">Hypertext</h1>
<p>
<b>HTML</b> stands for HyperText Markup Language. Hypertext
expresses the idea
that you can click on what you are reading to jump to something else
which is related. This is the same
<span style="font-style: italic">hyper</span> in hyperspace
that the characters in your favorite
science-fiction story are always jumping through. The idea is to
go immediately to a distant place. In the case of documents,
you are going to
a place which may be far away in whatever scheme is normally used
to order the documents.
</p>
<P>
HTML is a way of expressing hypertext, but the idea
is older. The first mention
is probably
Vannevar Bush's description of <span style="color: #4B935D">Memex</span>
in 1945. The term was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965, and was
popularly embodied in the HyperCard application shipped with the
original Apple Macintosh (from
<a href="http://www.fact-index.com/h/hy/hypertext.html">Fact-Index.com</a>).
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The <span style="font-family: monospace;">span</span> tag is just
a holder for its style attribute; the tag itself changes nothing.
The <span style="font-family: monospace;">div</span> tag is similar,
except it also makes its contained text into a separate block.
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