WEBLINKER, A TOOL FOR MANAGING WWW CROSS-REFERENCES

With converters such as WebMaker and LaTeX2HTML commonly available, la rge sections of the web are being generated automatically. One consequ ence of this flexibility is that the physical location, node granulari ty, and even the contents of many documents are more liable to change. Therefore some mechanism is needed to simplify the creation and maint enance of hypertext links pointing to specific locations in such const antly changing ''living'' infostructures. WebLinker allows a document writer to assign logical names to destination links within his documen t. These logical names provide a consistent view of the document as a changing infostructure. We show how this idea allows dynamic translati on of a fragment identifier within the infostructure to a URL when it is traversed. WebLinker also provides a mechanism to create logical na mes for resources that are external to the infostructure. These Local Resource Names (LRNs) may then be resolved separately from the documen t generation process into appropriate URLs. In this paper we describe the implementation of WebLinker and also give a complete example of ho w to convert your documents into logical infostructures.