Hyperlinking

History

Released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh, the database program HyperCard allowed for hyperlinking between various pages within a document, as well as to other documents and separate applications on the same computer. In 1990, , which was introduced with Microsoft Windows 3.0, had widespread use of hyperlinks to link different pages in a single together; in addition, it had a visually different kind of hyperlink that caused a popup help message to appear when clicked, usually to give definitions of terms introduced on the help page. The first widely used open protocol that included hyperlinks from any Internet site to any other Internet site was the Gopher protocol from 1991. It was soon eclipsed by HTML after the 1993 release of the Mosaic browser (which could handle Gopher links as well as HTML links). HTML's advantage was the ability to mix graphics, text, and hyperlinks, unlike Gopher, which just had menu-structured text and hyperlinks.