HyperCard has made charting and navigation through graphic networks easy. However, text would seem to require graphic representation to maintain links, thereby losing its ease of editing and transfer.
In trying to manage information that is continually being updated, there is a clear need for keeping text both in text fields (for textual massaging) and in linked networks. That is, in the case of HyperCard, having the button attached to a text word. That is, hypertext.
HyperCard does not have this capacity. However, by using its ability to recognize selected text words, and by using specific fields to identify cards, hypertext can be approached. This is such an attempt.
This is not an attempt to link one specific word to a script of actions: a button is not attached to a text word. Instead, it begins from the usefulness of a general search of a selected word in finding links within textual information: a general indexing system. If the information includes words that serve both within discussions and as names of discussions, then the use of searching selected words becomes more powerful. Then it is possible to search only for a match between a word selected from a discussion and a word that has significance in being part of a name of a thereby linked discussion. The index becomes more powerful by ignoring insignificant matches.
My immediate motivation has been in dealing with medical information. Here, for example, words that are symptoms in the description of one disease are also words that are the names of lists of differential diagnoses and approaches to clinical presentations. Words that are diseases in the discussion of an environmental insult are also words that are the names of descriptions of pathogenesis, treatment, etc.
Words have general use because of their use as both names and parts of descriptions. So, although this cannot fulfill true hypertext (connecting specific scripts to specific words in text fields), it does have general use in connecting selected words to those in identifying fields.
