Jusletter IT

Hypertext may loosely be described as pointers from one location in a document to another. The concept has been widely popularised by links between web-pages, where typically an element is one page serves as a button which executes a link for another page (rather than to an element in that other page). The links create a maze of networks between documents, and make it possible to unravel a thread of related documents by following the links from document to document. Being popularised by the technology associated with World-Wide Web and HTML-coding of documents, some have made the claim that this is a novel way of navigate within or between documents. In this brief paper, some relations to the basic theory of text retrieval and older efforts is sketched, hopefully providing a perspective that also for appreciating hyperstructures.