EXTERNAL ANCHORING FOR WIDE-AREA NETWORK SUPPORT - THE RHYTHM PROJECT

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.