Location: Hypertext Review / Implementation Issues / Hypertext Template Requirements Site Map

The following are some requirements for a hypertext system to provide templates:

  1. It should provide some generic operations to create, duplicate, edit or delete a template. Duplication should yield empty documents with nodes and links.
  2. There should be facilities to add contents to empty documents, list templates and their constituent documents and links, to display an overview of the template, to access a template by its type (“get a copy of the planning template”), by author, or by creation date.
  3. There should be control operations to displaying an overview of the template, to zoom into specific link sets or webs or subgraphs and look at the contents of documents.
  4. Strategic choices must exist to find out the master template from which a duplicate was created and to edit the master template. Editing a master template should propagate the changes to all templates created from it.
  5. Facilities should exist to specify formats and screen layouts for a template and to add help.
  6. Reactive choices must be provided to directly manipulate the contents of documents within a template such as editing, deleting, creating new links etc.