Multi-Head Multi-Tail Mosaic
Brian C. Ladd, Michael V. Capps, Paul David Stotts, Rick Furuta · 1995
The explosive growth of the World Wide Web is attributable, in large part, to the simplicity of the distributed graph model it uses for information storage and retrieval. The model is simple, general, and ubiquitous; the reader may choose almost any browsing path. Information providers, though, then use every trick at their disposal in an attempt to increase their power over how readers browse their pages. Two major shortcomings of current Web protocols are lack of support for concurrent browsing and synchronization of multiple browsing paths. This paper presents a computer-aided instruction scenario where the author (instructor) must overcome these weaknesses. In traditional hypermedia systems, a link relates a single source node to a single destination node. Projects such as Xanadu [3] and Trellis [6] previously generalized links to allow connection of multiple source nodes to multiple destination nodes. This generalization, which we term a Multi-Head/Multi-Tail (MHMT) link, allows an author to create concurrent browsing paths in a document, and to synchronize those concurrent paths if desired. This has applications to groupware as well as to documents browsed by single users. We describe our solution embodied in MHTML as a straightforward extension to HTML for defining multi-head/multi-tail links and an experimental browser called MMM that implements the extensions.