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Since the very first papyrus scrolls were first used to capture written
language, it has become most natural to conceive of text as a single,
linear and continuous thread, authored and then read as a single stream.
But as books became longer Tables of Contents were prepended, Indices
were appended and the opportunities for traversing the text in
fundamentallly nonlinear ways became more and more common. As
we become interested in other kinds of documents, many bring their own
special structures and writing conventions, for example the abstract
paragraph, introductions and conclusions of longer papers, the
``Methods'' sections in scientific papers. In news reporting SPIRAL
EXPOSITION is often used: a news item is summarized in the first
paragraph, then treated in more detail in the paragraphs that fit on
Page 1 or ``above the fold'' of the newspaper, and in more detail still
in the body of the article.
The attempt to analyze, support, and create
such nonlinear, HYPERTEXT relations among documents began long
before the WWW made hypertext links commonplace; Vanavar
Bush's ``As We May Think'' article (published in 1945!) [REF701] and Ted Nelson's revolutionary
Xanadu Xanadu project [Nelson87]
are often mentioned as seminal works. Mice and graphical interfaces made
clicking on one textual passage, so as to jump to another, second
nature. Hypertext conferences focused on these new issues began in the
mid-1980s, and taken on new energy as the HTTP protocols and HTML
authoring languages made it easy to support many kinds of intra- and
inter-document relations [REF700] [REF728] [Agosti92a] [Agosti92b] [Bruza92] [Egan91] . In the process, many types of
linkage between documents have been proposed. The following sections
mention some of the most common and useful, sometimes using this FOA
text (self-referentially!) as examples.
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Hypertext, intra-document links
Subsections