4WWW95: authoring tools

NOTE: this was actually a stream of multiple papers.

a schema-based approach to HTML authoring:

marcus kesseler from the university of erlangen-nürnberg, germany, presented an approach to high-productivity authoring of large, regularly structured hypertexts.

he distinguished between:

• authoring a small amount of documents
• large scale authoring with thousands of documents, possibly spread over hundreds of nodes

his schema based approach includes four steps:

1. create a class schema by modeling the existing objects and their relationship.
2. create instances of the schema in a fairly intuitive fashion visually on a graphic user interface
3. edit the contents of the instances (type the text)
4. compile the hypertext documents

the implementation called "Hypertext Structure Description Language" (HSDL) features the following properties:

• a graphical user interface
• easy creation and maintenance
• supports operations for schema evolution
• linearisation of documents for printing
• built in HTML editor
• hypertext generation controlled by user configurable "expanders"

this paper is no longer available on the Web.

rules for extending a WWW client: the Symposia API:

jean paoli, technical director of GRIF SA, france, presented Symposia, a WYSIWYG authoring tool that allows the creation and modification of HTML and SGML documents directly on the Web. it supports creation, editing and remote saving of documents by multiple authors on the network.

Alliance, structured cooperative authoring on the World Wide Web:

Alliance is a groupware application that allows several authors to work simultaneously on the same document. this is achieved by breaking a document into so called "fragments". each fragment may be stored on a different computer on a network. consistency is maintained via access control which allows various so called "user roles". the following user roles are currently implemented:

• manager: has read and write access to the fragment and may change the access rights of other users. there may be multiple managers for the same fragment, but only one manager can be active at any given time.
• writer: may write to a fragment. at a given time, only one user can have write access to a particular fragment.
• reader: may read a fragment. many users can read the same fragment at any given time.
• null: no access to the fragment.

at any time, the document appears as one complete document to any reader, except for the fragments where she or he has no access at all (null role). the appearance of the fragments varies according to the current access rights.

in Alliance, a document is represented by a set of files which contain the document fragments, user roles, the order of the fragments and the state of each fragment. each system involved in a document has a copy of ALL files that belong to this document. to maintain consistency even in the case of a network failure, one copy of each fragment is marked as the MASTER COPY. management and write operations are allowed only on the master copy. the transfer of the master copy from one system to another is transaction based, so it cannot be duplicated or get lost, even in the case of a communication failure.

the boomerang:

boomerang is a dynamic HTML page reconfiguration system. based on a user's template, it manipulates the appearance of HTML documents according to the user's preferences. bommerang may add additional links, suppress images or perform any other changes possible with a sequence of string manipulation rules.

boomerang is implemented via the Common Gateway Interface, a user accesses it by supplying a page name and a template which contains the manipulation rules.

back to 4WWW95 main document.