Method for promoting contextual information to display pages containing hyperlinks

Contextual information concerning linked documents is promoted to display pages that contain hyperlinks to those documents. The contextual information can be immediately displayed, or it can be selectively displayed in response to a user selecting a text hyperlink anchor or a picture icon hyperlink anchor. Furthermore, the contextual information can include a variety of information about the linked document, including whether it has been modified within a predefined time period, such as the last 24 hours, a comment by the author concerning recent changes, and the size of the document. Preferably, the contextual information is automatically generated by a data promotion engine based on meta-data that is associated with the document and stored on a web site for the document. The contextual information may be either added to the document that corresponds to a display page at the time the document page is saved, or it may be dynamically uploaded to a browser when the display page is rendered by a browser. One of the types of contextual information stored in the meta-data is a manually defined category for a hyperlink in the display page.