Hypermedia – Hypertext Template Requirements
The following are some requirements for a hypertext system to provide templates:
- It should provide some generic operations to create, duplicate, edit or delete a template. Duplication should yield empty documents with nodes and links.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Facilities should exist to specify formats and screen layouts for a template and to add help.
- Reactive choices must be provided to directly manipulate the contents of documents within a template such as editing, deleting, creating new links etc.