The following are some thoughts on usefulness of hypertext
Navigation is the main drawback of hypertext. As the document is interlinked and may loop, readers can easily lose track of where they have been and where they are. The freedom to choose to follow any of the links may take the reader away from the item being sought. There are insufficient clues as to where an anchor links to.
A catalogue is readily available in a physical library and the user can easily find out whether the book he requires is available or not. It is difficult to index a hypertext document due to multiple links within a document, unless the reader is guided to a certain sequence of links.
Therefore, extraction of required information is tedious, especially in large hypertext documents. Search facilities attempt to make this easier. However, when searching a large content of information, such as the Web, the results of the search itself may be extensive. Moreover, these search facilities usually only recognise text descriptions and not the multimedia content of the document. This undermines the benefits of hypermedia.
Computer names may change and linked documents can be moved to other host computers. Hypertext requires explicit pointers to the names of the computers and the files on these computers, or the fragment of information that is linked to will no longer be accessible.
Hypertext content assumes universal coverage and infinite transfer capacity. The capacity of the telecommunications network may not be sufficient to cope with the usage without penalising or compromising other network activities. This happens when the reader is not warned of the document size, or is not conscious of the network implications. This results in a technical halt or slowdown in navigating through the hypertext.
Multiple Clients
These are all the people who visit it, or more precisely, they are the browsers used to view the site.
There are not multiple servers for this site.
For heavily used sites, the site is copied to another computer, called a mirror site. "Mirrors" are used to reduce traffic to the base site. Overall net traffic should also be reduced, as clients will go to a mirror that is closer than the base server. Mirrors add redundancy and make the site more likely to always be available. If one mirror goes down, other mirrors are likely to remain up.
The following might be needed to give a history of site usage.
The data that is needed is a list of all the pages that a given browser has visited on the site.
What the server can do is maintain a list of all the people who visit the site and which pages they have visited. This can be stored on the server.
Alternatively, JavaScript code could be used to maintain the information on the browser using cookies. This is probably more difficult, and would only work for the current visit. (When the browser application was halted, all the information would be lost.) So, it would be better to store the information on the server side.
If the data is stored on the server, then this should be a server-side application. The server can process the information and simply return a number representing the number of pages the user has visited. That number is returned to the browser. The alternative is to send all of the data (all the pages/user pairs) to the browser and then carry out the processing there.
The server will append the new type onto the information it sends. The server needs to know the type, but that should be fairly straightforward as the server is providing the data, so the administrator will have set that up.
The client needs to know what the type is, and have a method of displaying the data.
The browser itself could display the data, e.g. like a GIF file.
The browser could use a plug-in. If it were a new file type, the group who developed the file type might provide a plug-in to read the type.
The other options are automatically invoked from current browsers. Since the browser does not know what to do with the file type, it puts up a dialogue box to ask the user. If the user knows which application to invoke, the user names that application, which is then invoked and passed the file (the Excel chart file in this case). Instead of opening the file, you could execute Excel, open the file, save it, and deal with it later.
Discuss the results of exercise 6 with your colleagues studying the module in the Discussion Forum. In particular, you should be able to state the smallest amount of time which you were able to run all six processes in, and be able to explain your results.
It is easy to create anchors which will link fragments of information together in a hypertext document. There is no real sequence to the information. New fragments can be inserted anywhere in a hypertext document as long as the anchors are properly implemented to link the new and existing fragments.
If the hypertext document is small and does not contain many external links, information can be retrieved quickly with the browsing feature. The difficulty arises when the hyperspace is vast and there are many links in each page. Numerous links imply the possibilities of many different exploration paths. This makes navigation through the network of documents for the required information tedious.
Knowledge additivity connects different aspects of information from different fields of study together, therefore the information is more useful. Let's say X=hunting skills and Y=using bows and arrow. Take a reader who wants to know how to hunt well with bows and arrows (Z). It is possible to achieve this with knowledge additivity in hypertext. (Z=X+Y)
A hypertext document is a non-linear document that implements anchors containing links to connect various fragments of information into one mesh network.
Hypermedia is an extension to hypertext that includes digitised sounds and moving images.
The user is free to choose which links to follow in multi-linked hypertext document. Each sequence of links constructs a unique navigation path.
Authoring hypertext requires the decomposition of documents into fragments of information and then the construction of links between the fragments.
The Web is an example of networked hypermedia. There is no central authority dictating its development and its information content is geographically-independent. The ease of linking information is one of the major benefits of hypertext.
Navigation difficulties through the various possibilities of different paths is the main drawback of hypertext. Extracting the information required can become tedious.