The official description describes the World-Wide Web as a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents". What the World-Wide Web (WWW, W3) project has done is provide users on computer networks with a consistent means to access a variety of media in a simplified fashion. Using a popular software interface to the Web called Mosaic, the Web project has changed the way people view and create information - it has created the first true global hypermedia network.

For instance, suppose you were able to somehow select (with a mouse or with your finger) the word "hypertext" in the sentence before this one. In a hypertext system, you would then have one or more documents related to hypertext appear before you - a history of hypertext, for example, or the Webster's definition of hypertext. These new texts would themselves have links and connections to other documents - continually selecting text would take you on a free-associative tour of information. In this way, hypertext links, called hyperlinks, can create a complex virtual web of connections.

Hypermedia is hypertext with a difference - hypermedia documents contain links not only to other pieces of text, but also to other forms of media - sounds, images, and movies. Images themselves can be selected to link to sounds or documents. Here are some simple examples of hypermedia:

*     You are reading a text on the Hawaiian language. You select a Hawaiian phrase, then hear the phrase as spoken in the native tongue.

*     You are a law student studying the Hawaii Revised Statutes. By selecting a passage, you find precedents from a 1920 Supreme Court ruling stored at Cornell. Cross-referenced hyperlinks allow you to view any one of 520 related cases with audio annotations.

*     Looking at a company's floorplan, you are able to select an office by touching a room. The employee's name and picture appears with a list of their current projects.

*     You are a scientist doing work on the cooling of steel springs. By selecting text in a research paper, you are able to view a computer-generated movie of a cooling spring. Byselecting a button you are able to receive a program which will perform thermodynamic calculations.

*     A student reading a digital version of an art magazine can select a work to print or display in full. If the piece is a sculpture, she can request to see a movie of the sculpture rotating. By interactively controlling the movie, she can zoom in to see more detail.

The Web, although still in its early years, allows many of these examples to work in real life. It facilitates the easy exchange of hypermedia through networked environments from anything as small as two Macintoshes connected together to something as large as the global Internet.

*     Anything served through Gopher

*     Anything served through WAIS (Wide-Area Information Service)

*     Anything served through anonymous FTP sites

*     Full Archie services (a FTP search service)

*     Full Veronica services (a Gopher search service)

*     Full CSO, X.500, and whois services (Internet phone book services)

*     Full finger services (an Internet user lookup program)

*     Any library system using PALS (a library database standard)

*     Anything on Usenet

*     Anything accessible through telnet

*     Anything in hytelnet (a hypertext interface to telnet)

*     Anything in techinfo or texinfo (forms of campus-wide information services)

*     Anything in hyper-g (a networked hypertext system in use throughout Europe)

*     Anything in the form of man pages

*     HTML-formatted hypertext and hypermedia documents

Here's an example of how the process works:

1.     Running a Web client (also called a browser), the user selects a piece of hypertext connected to another text - "The History of Computers".

2.     The Web client connects to a computer specified by a network address somewhere on the Internet and asks that computers Web server for "The History of Computers".

3.     The server responds by sending the text and any other media within that text (pictures, sounds, or movies) to the users screen. The World-Wide Web is composed of thousands of these virtual transactions taking place per hour throughout the world, creating a web of information flow.