XConnector and XTemplate: improving the expressiveness and reuse in web authoring languages

  • Authors:

  • Débora Christina Muchaluat-Saade;Luiz Fernando Gomes Soares

  • Affiliations:

  • Departamento de Engenharia de Telecomunicações, UFF R. Passo da Pátria, RJ and TeleMídia Lab, Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio, R. Marquês de São Vicente, RJ ...;TeleMídia Lab, Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio R. Marquês de São Vicente, 225, Gávea, 22453-900, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia - Hypermedia and the world wide web
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Despite recent efforts made by the W3C, web-authoring languages still need to be enhanced. Aiming at this goal, this paper presents proposals for improving their expressiveness and reuse. The proposals are based on an XML language called XConnector, which provides for the creation of complex referential and multimedia synchronization relations. XConnector can be used for improving the expressiveness of either linking languages, such as XLink, or linking modules of hypermedia authoring languages, such as XHTML or SMIL. The novel contribution of this paper is another XML language called XTemplate, which provides for the creation of hypermedia composite templates. A composite template specifies types of components, types of relations, components and relationships that a hypermedia composition has or may have, without identifying what all the components and relationships are. Templates are traditionally used for improving reuse. Composite templates allow the definition of common structures, which can be seen as representing types of compositions with specific semantics given by the set of defined relationships. Therefore, composite templates could be used to provide new time containers in web languages, besides the well known par, seq and excl provided by SMIL 2.0. The paper also presents how composite templates are used in the HyperProp hypermedia system and proposes an extension to XLink to incorporate facilities provided by XConnector and XTemplate, improving its expressiveness and reuse.