Distributed affordance: An open-world assumption for hypermedia

Abstract

Hypermedia links and controls drive the Web by transforming information into affordances through which users can choose actions. However, publishers of information cannot predict all actions their users might want to perform and therefore, hypermedia can only serve as the engine of application state to the extent the user's intentions align with those envisioned by the publisher. In this paper, we introduce distributed affordance, a concept and architecture that extends application state to the entire Web. It combines information inside the representation with knowledge of action providers to generate affordance from the user's perspective. Unlike similar approaches such as Web Intents, distributed affordance scales both in the number of actions and the number of action providers, because it is resource-oriented instead of action-oriented. A proof-of-concept shows that distributed affordance is a feasible strategy on today's Web.