A data processor controlled user interactive display system for displaying hypertext documents, each including a sequence of display screen pages received over a communications network such as the World Wide Web. In order to reduce downloading time, Web pages are transmitted as HTML files in which images are represented by identifiers. The images corresponding to the identifiers may be fetched from libraries of universal images. The invention is implemented by the display stations which receive the Web pages. These stations, through associated browsers, retrieve the universal image libraries via the internet and download such libraries once and store them locally on caches associated with the browsers.