This was written for a possible book in around 1993/4. Written in Microsoft word, copied to HTML and salvaged by hand. ..Tim BL
This part of the book cannot be a tour of the most exciting parts of the web, as new things are appearing so often that it would within weeks pale beside a later version. This section will therefore just give some examples of the sort of thi which can be done and has been done.
[maybe all examples would be better in parallel with the text itself]
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Internet news articles have been around for many years, and have been one of the wonders of the Internet. Although it has not always been used to advantage, news articles contain lots of useful pointer information, to their news groups, their authors, and articles to which they specifically refer. This is all ripe for representation as hypertext.
Internet news articles are distributed by a "flooding" method. Every computer passes a new message on to all its neighbours who don't have it already. The articles can, like hot gossip, start anywhere, and will go everywhere. Each article is allocated, by its author, to one or more "news groups". A news group is one of a carefully maintained set of subject headings, a little like a library classification system. In this scheme, comp.sys.mac means "Computing: Specific computer systems: The Macintosh", and "soc.culture.indian" means "Society: Culture: Indian culture" (@@ real group?)
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Example: A news article as hypertext.