David G. Durand

What is text, really?

THE WAY IN WHICH TEXT IS represented on a computer affects the kinds of uses to which it can be put by its creator and by subsequent users. The electronic document model currently in use is impoverished and restrictive. The authors argue that text is best represented as an ordered hierarchy of content object (OHCO), because that is what text really is. This model conforms with emerging standards such as SGML and contains within it advantages for the writer, publisher, and researcher. The authors then describe how the hierarchical model can allow future use and reuse of the document as a database, hypertext, or network.

MAPA: a system for inducing and visualizing hierarchy in Websites

The MAPA system provides improved navigation facilities for large web sites. It extracts a hierarchical structure from an arbitrary web site, with no or minimal human assistance, and creates an interactive map of that site that can be used for orientation and navigation. MAPA is designed and most useful for large web sites of from 500 to 50,000 pages. We present an overview of the mapping problem, with a list of 10 important user facilities that maps can offer. Then we describe how the MAPA system analyzes the link structure of a site, and provides effective aids for the navigation of large hypertexts. We also compare MAPA with a number of other web-mapping systems, and conclude with a review of how MAPA stands with respect to our wish-list of map features.

Requirements for distributed authoring and versioning on the World Wide Web

m Current World Wide Web (WWW or Web) standards provide simple support for applications that allow remote editing of typed data. In practice, the existing capabilities of the WWW have proven inadequate to support efficient, scalable, remote editing, free of overwriting conflicts. A list of features in the form of requirements which, if implemented, would improve the efficiency of common remote editing operations, provide a locking mechanism to prevent overwrite conflicts, improve relationship management support between non-HTML data types, provide a simple attribute-value metadata facility, provide for the creation and reading of container data types, and integrate versioning into the WWW are presented in this article. unctionality which, if standardized in the context of the WWW, would allow tools for remote loading, editing and saving (publishing) of various media types on the WWW to interoperate with any compliant Web server is described here. As much as possible, this functionality is described without proposing an implementation, since there are many ways to perform the functionality within the WWW framework. It could be implemented in extensions to HTTP, in a new protocol to be layered on top of HTTP, in additional MIME types, or some combination of these and other approaches. It is also possible that a single mechanism could simultaneously satisfy several requirements. In this article we want to reflect the consensus of the WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning working group (WebDAV) on the functionality that needs to be standardized to support distributed authoring and versioning on the Web. However, this version still has some problems and questions that are being debated in the working group:

Things change: deal with it! versioning, cooperative editing and hypertext

A document that is in active use is generally one that is changing. Version control provides one way to control the disruptive effects of change without the worse solution of preventing or obstructing it. This panel will examine the relevance and problems of version control, with an emphasis on the topic of collaboration support. Despite ha long history in the hypertext communhy (usually as something to be added in tie future), the topics of shared editing and revision control remain complex, controversial and frequently misunderstood. Now that a really large public hypertext has come into existence, the issues of long-term maintenance and referential integrity are coming to the fore. The panel will give an overview of the fundamental issues, as well as a selection of arguments for and against different approaches to the issues. It builds on the perspective the presenters have gained from their own research, as well as their workshops on Hypertext and version control at ECHT ’94 and ECSCW ’95.

FRESS hypertext system (abstract)

The FRESS poetry project was a pioneering use of hypertext in teaching in the humanities. All course readings were kept online in FRESS files that were accessible to the entire class. Student essays were handed by being linked to the material to be read. The instructor’s comments on the students’ work were also attached via links. The issues of file sharing for the class were simply addressed since there was only one graphics terminal capable of running the full FRESS interface. Thus all students had to go to specially scheduled lab times in order to do their readings and complete their assignments.

Hypertext-related standards efforts

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The HyTime Query Language

HyQ, the HyTime query language, provides the answer to situations where you need to specify hyperlinks to locations that may change over time or where a compact notation is preferable to a long location ladder. HyQ queries are similar to database queries, except that they have special facilities for dealing effectively with hierarchical structures like SGML documents, something that is not practical in the relational database model

The Structure of HyTime

This chapter provides an overview of the organization of HyTime and the conventions used to describe and define it. It explores the notion of “architectural forms” used in the definition of HyTime and SGML issues related to using HyTime productively. It also explains the HyTime model of hyperdocument and the major pieces of a complete HyTime software system and how they fit together. Finally, it describes HyTime’s method of declaring that an SGML document is a HyTime document and which optional features are used in a document

Advanced Measurement and Scheduling

This chapter introduces three separate but closely related topics for handling multimedia: the advanced portions of the HyTime Measurement module (clause 7), for representing units and measurements, the Scheduling module (clause 10), for representing the temporal and spatial relations of data in multimedia presentations, and the Rendition module (clause 11) for representing processes that affect the presentation of data

HyTime Quick Start

This chapter introduces the basic concepts and structures of HyTime through a series of examples. The examples do not include all the required declarations and setup, but working through them will give you a feeling for how HyTime approaches hypertext/hypermedia linking, and what constructs and terminology you should keep in mind throughout the following chapters