Basic Features of a Hypertext System

• A Graphical User Interface, with the help of browsers and overview diagrams, helps the user to navigate through large amounts of information by activating links and reading the contents of nodes.
• An authoring system with tools to create and manage nodes (of multiple media) and links.
• Traditional information retrieval (IR) mechanisms such as keyword searches, author searches etc. There are also attempts to incorporate structure queries along with content queries - retrieving a part of the hypertext network based on some user-specified criteria.
• A hypermedia engine to manage information about nodes and links.
• A storage system which can be a filesystem or a knowledge base or a relational database management system or an object-oriented database management system.