XML-LINK

[len bullard]

W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
 
> Remember that there are two basic "modes" of link processing:
> 
> 1. The "I know everything mode", in which you need both to know the
> boundaries of the documents you need to know about (i.e., a "bounded object
> set") and a general processor capable of doing the processing and holding
> the result for some reasonable length of time. This is the
> HyBrowse/Hyper-G/Intranet approach, in which the bounds of the system are
> fairly well defined and you have the infrastructure you need to manage all
> the link information more or less persistenty.

Isn't this also the mode of WinHelp?  WinHelp uses a restricted target 
set (footnotes in page delimited chunks), but the rest of the
hyperlinking 
is topical based on the project file (defines the objects whose topics 
are targets) and the #define files (string and paired ID) for the 
software to use for contextual help, and the compiled files.

> 2. The "I only know about what I have seen or am now seeing" mode.  This is
> the normal "Web" mode or the Panorama mode (except that Panorama only
> remembers what it knows about the current document, unfortunately).

How does Panorama store linking information?

> Note that the two modes can be combined, such that you might know
> everything about one set of documents but only about pointers to another
> set.  The data structures needed to manage knowledge of the links is the
> same in both modes, the only question is when do you gather the knowledge?

Well, not just when, but how is it packed if it is in separate files for 
different processors?  Consider the winHelp model.  I ask because my 
guess is a very high percentage of the legacy hypertext in the world 
right now in need of conversion is WinHelp.  That means taking the 
separate pieces and mapping them to the XML-n models.

len

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