Interoperability on the World Wide Web

Jacco van Ossenbruggen, CWI, Amsterdam

5th Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems, Hypertext '99 Darmstadt, Germany, February 21, 1999.

Abstract

In open hypermedia systems, a common scenario is to have a broad range of desktop applications that share hyperlinks and other structures by making use of one or more distributed hypermedia servers. In contrast, on the Web the typical scenario is to have a single client application on the user's desktop, that communicates with the (typically many) servers that store the documents that are relevant to the user.

Currently, the Web is evolving towards an environment which supports many alternative scenarios, in which the browser plays a less dominant role. These alternatives raise new requirements that will necessitate modification of the current Web protocols, as well as the development of entire new ones. The objective of this paper is to inform the OHS community of the current efforts of W3C to move in this new direction, and the possible relationship these efforts have with the current OHS activities.

See the Position paper for more information. Transparencies are available in PostScript.