Hand-made and Computed Links, Precomputed and Dynamic Links.
Helen Ashman, Alejandra Garrido, Harri Oinas‐Kukkonen · 1997
Introduction This paper surveys the use of hand-made and computed links in hypermedia systems and contrasts precomputation and dynamic computation of those links which are computed. This paper seeks to raise all the issues in one place, so that designers of hypermedia systems can consider the issues together, whether they can afford to ignore some forms of link, which forms are the most suitable to their working environment, and so on. Many hypermedia systems were designed with a rather ad-hoc approach, with new ideas for link creation and maintenance being added as fixes to perceived problems in operational systems. For example, open hypermedia systems introduced externalised links, stored separately from the data they linked, however externalised links highlighted the problem of referential integrity, so dynamic linking approaches were introduced as a fix to that problem (Davis et al., 1992). So we present a comprehensive list of the issues in the creation and maintenance of