Carl's Introduction to Hypertext

Hypertext means text that has words (or icons) highlighted that can be selected. Windows help files are hypertext--just double-click a green word and you see something else.

On Grex, the only hypertext we have is in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), and it can be viewed by several viewers. Lynx is the only viewer running on this system.

To write HTML hypertext, you just edit a file and add commands.

<title>This is the Document's Title</title>

is an example of what these commands look like. Hypertext can contain links to other files, but it doesn't have to. Probably the most common commands are:

<title>...</title>: for the title (appears on top right of screen)
<pre>...</pre>: for preformatted text (<pre> makes it print the way it appears in the editor--as far as spacing and paragraphs go.)
<p>: for a new paragraph (without <p> or <pre>, the whole document will look like one paragraph)
<h1>...</h1>: for a top header (it prints a centered header in capitals)
<a href=http://www.cyberspace.org/~carl/index.html>My Home Page</a>: for a link to another file

If you'd like to try writing a hypertext document, start a new file named "myfile.html" with your favorite editor. Put in a title and a header, and then type in some text.

To view this file, type "lynx myfile.html" and you'll see it as hypertext. If it doesn't look right, you can edit it from within lynx by typing an "e". (This gives you the editor from your options page, available by pressing "o".) When you exit the editor, you will see what the hypertext looks like.

Please mail carl if you have any questions. I like to see people experimenting with hypertext and developing their own files.