Associative Structures
Texts on the Web are structured in a more associative manner than traditional print texts. Information is displayed using nodes and links. A node is a chunk of information. it may be a page, a paragraph, a sentence, or a character. A node can even be a graphic. A link is a connection between nodes. You will often see links represented in blue underlined text that turns purple after you visit that link, these are the default colors. links will not always appear this way, often times links are buttons or graphics.
There are three basic structures of links and nodes that Web documents usually follow. Every document may not resemble wholly one of these structures but may contain elements of any number of these structures.