Basic Features of a Hypertext System

1. 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.
   
   
2. An authoring system with tools to create and manage nodes (of multiple media) and links.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. A hypermedia engine to manage information about nodes and links.
   
   
5. 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.