Authoring-in-the-large: software engineering techniques for hypertext application design

Abstract

This paper discusses a structured approach to hypertext application design which we have called "authoring-in-the-large". This approach is based on the belief that in order to get a consistent, expressive, usable hypertext, the application should be first designed at conceptual level in a system independent manner. The author should try to describe global properties of an application - its representation structures, navigational patterns, operational semantics, overall visualization and display aspects, before actually creating and filling in the nodes' content. In addition, this paper presents HDM - Hypertext Design Model, a first attempt toward developing high level design primitives for describing static and dynamic aspects of hypertext applications from the authoring-in-the-large point of view.