Making complex document structures accessible through templates

ABSTRACT

We address two problems of technical authors in structured environments: (1) Structure definitions of the SGML school are limiting: they require one primary hierarchy and do not cater for link types and (2) Real-life structure definitions are too large to be comprehended easily. As solutions, we propose graph types and usage templates.The edge types and inheritance of the proposed graph type model are useful modeling tools. We give examples for structures that can be expressed more precisely and with gain for the author using graph structures. There are also graphical tools available to define graph types and to specify operations on graphs.Templates can be used as a simple parameterization mechanism. A template illustrates the usual usage of a substructure, as opposed to the minimal one required by a structure definition, or the maximal one allowed by it.We also present a prototype authoring application based on these ideas.

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