Hypermedia

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What Does Hypermedia Mean?

Hypermedia is an extension to what is known as hypertext, or the ability to open new Web pages by clicking text links on a Web browser. Hypermedia extends upon this by allowing the user to click images, movies, graphics and other media apart from text to create a nonlinear network of information. The term was coined by Fred Nelson in 1965.

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Techopedia Explains Hypermedia

Hypermedia allows links to be embedded in multimedia elements like images and videos. You can tell if something is hypermedia by hovering the mouse cursor over the image or video – if the element is hypermedia, the cursor changes, usually into a small hand.

Although the Internet is the best example of the use of hypermedia, there is a lot of software that makes use of both hypermedia and hypertext. A lot of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software like Microsoft Office allow hypermedia and hypertext to be embedded into the documents created. For example, in Microsoft Word, users can add hyperlinks to any word and even add links to pictures. Microsoft PowerPoint has the same feature for hypermedia.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.