In a hypertext document, selecting a highlighted word, phrase, or image causes a new document or image or sound to be retrieved and displayed. WWW documents lead the user to skip from one document to another, retrieving information from servers scattered around the world. Viewing a WWW document with a Windows graphical client such as Cello, WinWeb, Mosaic, or Netscape is much like reading a magazine.
Textual information is displayed with typographic fonts.
Color graphics can be supplemented by sound that can be played by clicking an icon embedded in the document. Web documents can be interactive in that they can respond to a user who clicks a button on the document to submit information to the Web server or to send e-mail to a predetermined address. Client software, known as a Web browser, sends a request for information from the user's computer to a server running on another computer. The server processes the request and returns a file to the browser. The returned file will normally be a hypertext document, which is often referred to as a WWW page.