Separation of concerns in hypertext: Articulation points that increase flexibility

Abstract

The benefits of separating document structure from presentation have long been understood - e.g., the distinction between the SGML and DSSSL standards as well as the ODA standard's separation of layout and logical structure. More recently, the breadth of applications incorporating XML specifications have provided further evidence in the context of the World-Wide Web of the strength of the abstraction that this separation provides. The structure/presentation separation, focused on describing the characteristics of documents, usefully can be extended to encompass the additional characteristics of interactive hypertextual documents, such as the Web's-for example, specifying the hypertext's responses to the reader's actions remains outside of the scope of the structure/presentation representation. We have explored one such family of models in which the hypertext is modeled by an automaton structure rather than a graph structure. In this paper, I will discuss how these new articulation points have lead to investigations into novel and flexible hypertext/hypermedia system implementations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.