Programming environments and hypertext

Together with Kasper Østerbye , Kurt Nørmark has worked on programming environments based on hypertext.

The primary hypothesis of this work is that the concepts known from `Hypertext' can be used to model the program artifacts and their mutual relations during a program development process. In addition, and following from that, we also hypothesize that a programming environment can be build as a hypertext system.

In non-trivial program development projects, one of the primary problems is to administer the great amount of program pieces, documentation, and similar information. Central to such administration is the representation of relations among programs and documentation. Frequently there are many relations that only are present in the mind of the programmer, and as such they tend to be lost when time passes. Other relations are represented in non-systematic ways, or on such a form that they cannot be utillized by the tools of the environment. In this work, we use the hypertext link concept as a systematic representation of the relations among program pieces and documentation. The reasons are that (1) links have types, (2) links can be annotated using the attributes on them, and (3) links can be bound to interior points (or values) in the source and destinations nodes via use of anchoring.

Reports and papers:

In addition, the paper 'Rich Hypertext: a foundation for improved interaction techniques' in International Journal on Human Computer Studies (1995), 43 , 301-321 (with this abstract ) is a more general description of our ideas.
Last modified: Mon Mar 18 08:52:56 1996