C. Maioli et al., EXTERNAL ANCHORING FOR WIDE-AREA NETWORK SUPPORT - THE RHYTHM PROJECT, International journal of modern physics C, 5(5), 1994, pp. 769-783
A major step in future hypertext systems, will be that of providing so
me of the interactivity characteristics of small scale centralised col
laborative hypertext systems to larger scale, widely distributed ones
such as WWW. Particularly important, as often asserted, is allowing fr
ee linking to all users, which may pose severe scale problems unless s
pecific design decisions are taken. One design that is completely scal
able is storing links' anchors externally of the nodes they refer to a
nd obtaining correctly updated information by relying on automatic ver
sioning for all nodes. The RHYTHM hypertext system is a highly distrib
utable hypertext system based on this premise. It provides free link,
annotation, inclusion and customisation facilities to all users, creat
ing an integrated environment for public and private document. Modular
ity and expandability in the services provided to the users is also an
important part of the RHYTHM project, whose approach is based on allo
wing additional managers to be included in the client application in o
rder to carry out specific tasks or handle specific data types.