Wide-area distribution issues in Hypertext systems
Cesare Maioli, Stefano Sola, Fabio Vitali · 1993
Distributed hypertext systems are becoming increasingly common. Many complex problems must be solved for a hypertext system to work on a large scale network. Among them there are problems in concurrency, security, transparency and availability. Links play an important role in the possibility of distributing hypertext on a large scale; different link policies have different merits and defects. RHYTHM is a distributed hypertext system currently being developed at the University of Bologna. Its main feature regards inclusion, which allows the system to implement efficient versioning and multi-authoring mechanisms. The RHYTHM write-once approach to hypertext data, its external anchoring mechanism, user and group accounting and data replication are in our opinion interesting starting points for a discussion about some structural issues for the next generation distributed hypertext systems.