HYPERTREE - A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO WEB AUTHORING

The expansion of the World Wide Web (WWW) has created an increasing ne ed for tools capable of supporting WWW authors in composing documents using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Currently, most web author s use tools which are basically ordinary text editors and have additio nal features to facilitate the easy and correct use of HTML tags. This approach places the burden on the web author to design and then creat e the entire web site in a top-down fashion, without any explicit supp ort for the structural design of the site. In this paper we discuss an alternative structural approach to Web authoring, which is based on t he use of the HyperTree hypermedia system as the central authoring too l. The advantages of using HyperTree are two-dimensional. Firstly, web authors can manage a web site as a single complete hypermedia databas e. For example, HyperTree provides facilities like the automatic creat ion of indices and the discovery of link inconsistencies. Additionally , it organizes the web pages in an easy to understand hierarchy withou t using any HTML directly. Secondly, web end-users can benefit from th e use of HyperTree, since seeking information in structured web sites is generally less disorientating and develops fewer cognitive overhead s. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.