Holistic HyperText
HTML is only a partial Hypertext language.
Embedding links in documents is a fundamental flaw. Firstly, you are
pointing to other peoples documents, over which you have no control.
Secondly, you have hardwired even your own links, which makes the task of
managing a website grow disproportionately with the size of the site.
Broken Websites. Broken links.
Consider a programming analogy. The competent software engineer will never
hardwire external interfaces into his code. He will use external resources
that are specified at runtime, such as configuration files and
environment variables. Yet HTML constrains us to hardwire everything!
HTML is a non-scaleable experiment that has miraculously scaled up to
become the hottest thing of our times!
It is possible with CGI to overcome this problem, at least in part, by
generating dynamic links, provided the CGI knows what should be a link.
This is how WebȚing works.
When you enter a document in the WebȚing, you specify
What should link to this document?
as opposed to the conventional HTML
What does this document link to?
This information is entered in WebȚing's database. If you subsequently
move, change or delete the document, the database is updated accordingly,
and so all links to it are automatically updated (or deleted). Since
Holistic HTML links are generated at runtime, the integrity of links
is assured.
Holistic HyperText - Summary
HTML HyperText Holistic Hypertext
They are written into They are generated
Where do Hyperlinks your documents, and are dynamically from a
come from? correct at the time you database, and are correct
write them. at the time you read
them.
What happens when I You specify links to You specify keywords
create a new other documents as you which generate links from
document? see fit. other documents whenever
they are viewed.
What happens when I You go through every Links from - as well as
add a document to a document and decide to - existing documents
highly linked whether, and if so from are generated
collection? where, it should link to automatically.
the new document.
What happens when I You go through every Since it's no longer
delete a document document and remove there, links to it will
in a linked links to it. Or, more not appear in other
collection? usually, you have a documents. Automatic.
broken website.
What happens when I
modify a document
in a linked see above. see above.
collection?
More on:
1. How can I distinguish Holistic and static HTML Links?