WebLinker, a tool for managing WWW cross-references

Abstract

With converters such as WebMaker and LaTeX2HTML commonly available, large sections of the web are being generated automatically. One consequence of this flexibility is that the physical location, node granularity, and even the contents of many documents are more liable to change. Therefore some mechanism is needed to simplify the creation and maintenance of hypertext links pointing to specific locations in such constantly changing “living” infostructures. WebLinker allows a document writer to assign logical names to destination links within his document. These logical names provide a consistent view of the document as a changing infostructure. We show how this idea allows dynamic translation of a fragment identifier within the infostructure to a URL when it is traversed. WebLinker also provides a mechanism to create logical names for resources that are external to the infostructure, These Local Resource Names (LRNs) may then be resolved separately from the document generation process into appropriate URLs. In this paper we describe the implementation of WebLinker and also give a complete example of how to convert your documents into logical infostructures.