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Distributed Authoring on the Web with the bscw shared Workspace system
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| bet | 2/9 | | Sana | 22.07.2021 | | Hajmi | 34,45 Kb. | | #15603 |
The Web was originally intended to support a richer, more active form of information sharing than is currently the case. Early implementations at CERN allowed browsing of pages as is common today, but also supported annotation and addition of links between arbitrary pages, not just those on local servers the user can access and edit (Berners-Lee, 1992). Some of these concepts were carried through to early drafts of the standards for Web protocols which described features such as remote publishing of hypertext pages and check in/out support for locking documents to ensure consistency in a multi-author environment. To date these aspects have largely been side-lined while development of Web browsers, servers and protocols has focused on the more ÔpassiveÕ aspects of information browsing.
The emergence of tools like Netscape Composer (Gold) and America Online AOLpress suggests a return to the Web as the basis for more active information sharing. Such tools support WYSIWYG editing of Web pages and publishing to remote Web servers: a first step towards true distributed, cross-platform, collaborative authoring and annotation. These developments in turn raise questions of the support required for version management, consistency control and the like, and how (and to what extent) this support should be provided through extension of the standard Web protocols. These questions are the focus of the work of the recently established W3C Working Group on Distributed Authoring and Versioning.
To provide input to these discussions, we describe here our work with the BSCW Shared Workspace system (Bentley et al. 1997a, 1997b). Conceived as a means to support dispersed work-groups, BSCW provides features for sharing documents of any type by upload to a BSCW server. Simple locking and versioning services are also provided, and a basic event service informs users of the current state of the authoring process. BSCW integrates tools like Netscape Composer for remote WYSIWYG editing and publishing but is also accessible from standard Web browsers. The system was recently awarded joint first prize in the European Software Innovation Award competition (ESIPÕ96), and is freely available for non-commercial use.*1
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