Re: W3C and Handle technology

	Dropping in on this discussion, it has some relevancy to a
problem Im having at the moment. Im dealing with a large document
store where each document is a series of pages strung together
with forward/back buttons (these are made by a preproccesor
on a single document file).
	There is a need for these documents to be heavily crosslinked.
Rather than have a link like doc005.html#info where 005 is the
page number I want to reference doc.html#info since the actual concept
its linked to might move pages on revision of the document and
so I dont want to have to remake all the links to the document.
What this means is Im moving away from the idea of a page
being my basic unit on the web to a document being
the smallest unit.
	I tried implementing this at compile time of the documents with a DB
but not thinking it through I only spotted afterwards that you can set up a
circularity problem where two documents are linked to each other - which
one do you compile first to get its anchors in the DB? this problem
is of course not encountered on the web since URLs are evaluated
runtime.
	So I decide to move towards some kind of directory/mapping
service where the URLs are looked up runtime as the user accesses
the link. A CGI script would be inefficient for this and I could
write such a thing as a server module. After days of scouring
the web the only software I could find to do this kind of thing
is the BASIS webserver which for certain reasons Im hesitant to use.
Has anything of this sort been addressed before? Is LDAP relevant.
Anyone got any good pointers? Looking at w3c's Jigsaw project
it looks as if this would be an ideal platform to develop this kind
of scenario on, using resource mapping to equate the reference with
a real file. But Im reluctant to develop a commercial application
on a server which may only ever exist as a research project with no
commercial incentive to become a industry grade product.
(Jeeves doesnt seem to be far enough along to do this yet).

-Mark

Received on Friday, 23 August 1996 07:04:14 UTC