Experimenting with HyTime architectural forms for hypertext interchange

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Abstract

Microcosm [3,4] is an open hypermedia system developed over the past four years at the University of Southampton. A fundamental feature of Microcosm is that no information concerning links is held in documents; instead all link information is held in external linkbases which contain the required details about the source and destination anchors of the links. This feature is particularly important as it enables third party applications to act as document viewers since it is not necessary to adapt the application to manipulate data structures that include link anchor information. Another feature of Microcosm is that it is composed of independent components (document viewers and link managers) which communicate by passing messages.

The cost of working in such an open environment is that the speed of system response is not always optimal. For this reason we began investigating the possibilities of using Microcosm as a hypertext development environment and then mapping the completed hypertext onto other delivery systems: a first attempt at this project involves translating Microcosm into Windows Help files. There are many problems inherent in such a translation: Microcosm supports a range of link abstractions which may not map onto those available in an alternative hypermedia system (this is particularly the case as Microcosm allows users to add new functionality by writing their own components).

As an intermediate stage in mapping between Microcosm and other delivery systems we are currently producing some HyTime-based [1] document structures which describe Microcosm hypertexts, especially linkbases. We are defining a process that will convert a Microcosm dataset into this representation, and then further translation programs to convert (possibly a subset of) this HyTime representation to run on other hypermedia delivery systems.

This paper focuses on the hyper linking facilities of HyTime, ignoring its possibilities for representing multimedia objects themselves.