WWW94: DEC's WWW server, a case study

introduction

goals

DEC also wanted to establish several indexes so the readers could find a document in many different ways. users shall be able to navigate by:

• alphabetical document title
• document type (technical overview, performance report, etc.)
• document subject
• chronological order (actual reverse chronological order)
• random word search

design issues

• the digital logo on top of it
• a meaningful title
• a creation date
• the initials of the author

while experimenting with graphics, it has become clear the images must be kept small and rare. too many or too large images lead to unacceptable response time because a huge amount of data has to be transferred over the network which in turn distracts users from reading such pages.

implementation

building the indexes was rather easy. the procedure runs every night and rebuilds the indexes to include new documents.
also most of the HTML documents could be generated automatically from the abstracts. however some restrictions became apparent. by definition, HTML leaves the formatting of the document to the client. currently HTML does not support special formats like tables, TABs, etc. so in some cases it was necessary to convert the document manually or the original ASCII text was wrapped with the "preformated tag" which allows to preserve to format of a text.

results and lessons learned

one of the major problems encountered during the first few months was the fact, that they used URLs with absolute addresses. therefore it was not possible to move documents around or even to another system. all URLs that referred to another HTML document where translated into relative addresses.