The Internet Encyclopedia (Volume 3)

P1: 61

WL040C-197-Quin WL040/Bidgoli-Vol III-Ch-56 June 23, 2003 16:38 Char Count= 0

CONTENTCREATION ANDAUTHORING 689

structures and map out relationships among components

of Web content.

The external structure of Web content refers to the way

that Web content is presented to the front-end users. It

defines which data components make up a Web page and

how they will be arranged on the screen: dynamic posting,

JavaScript-enabled interaction, or a drop-down menu. Ex-

ternal structure design should also be compliant with the

accessibility guidelines proposed by the World Wide Web

Consortium (W3C). Nonetheless, these guidelines can also

be applied to general external structure design. W3C rec-

ommends to

Separate (internal) structure from presentation;


Provide text so that text can be rendered in ways that are

available to almost all browsing devices and accessible

to almost all users;


Create documents that work even if the user cannot see

and/or hear; and


Create documents that do not rely on one type of hard-

ware (W3C, 1999a).

High-quality content requires planning and decisions

on the sources, formats, and versions of content before it

is created. Generally, Web content can be divided into four

broad categories based on its source: internally created

and owned, owned outright (e.g., commissioned artwork),

acquired externally through leasing or subscription, or

linked to external sources but not owned nor leased. The

internally created and owned content includes a wide

variety of documents as results of planning, analysis,

designing, briefing, and many other organizational activ-

ities. These documents may be in the form of memos, re-

ports, press releases, product catalogs, online transaction

logs, white papers, or technical specifications and created

as HTML or files in other formats (e.g., sound and im-

ages captured in audio/videos, or recorded as data sets).

Some of them are currently active, i.e., being written or

revised, while others may be inactive and eventually re-

moved from the system. Some content such as planning

and technical documents often involve collaborative cre-

ation and reviewing; hence the content may be privileged

and need version and access control to ensure the effi-

ciency, consistency, and confidentiality of the content un-

der development. Both types of content—internally cre-

ated and owned outright—are assets of an organization,

though the organization does not have the right to revise

or change the commissioned content. Content acquired

externally usually comes in a package such as a database

with its own user interfaces, whereas linked content can

be anything and beyond the control of the Web content

management system.

Version Control and Collaborative Authoring

The term “version control” has long existed before the

Web. It was originally used to manage versions of source

code in programming projects (Fogel, 2001). Version con-

trol software allows a developer or a group of developers

to keep track of versions of program files that modifica-

tions have been made to. If a bug emerged after the new

version was implemented, the developer can reinstate the

earlier version into the system. If several developers are

working on the same source code, the system can detect

the changes and differences and automatically merge dif-

ferent versions into one copy. Version control in Web con-

tent creation and authoring essentially works the same

way as a version control system. It records the history in-

formation about a file or directory, including things such

as creation date, who created it, and the version number or

label. The version control system allows authorized users

to check out or check in files or directories. While a file

or directory is checked out of the system, the user can

lock it to prevent other users from accessing the same file

or directory. After the updates are done, the user unlocks

the file or directory by checking it back into the system.

If a piece of content needs to be removed or added for

any reason—or simply an earlier version of the Web site

is preferred—the version control system can be used to

restore the entire site to any previous state, rolling back

multiple variations and edits by all authors until a satis-

factory site can be put back in place (Dreilinger, 1999).

The concurrent versions system was implemented in

a UNIX environment and intended for computer profes-

sionals. In the Web development environment, version

control is as important as it is in software development.

However, Web authors often are not computer profession-

als and come with various levels of computer skill. Be-

sides, the content that Web authors create does not al-

ways fall into the category of program source code. The

version control system must be compatible with various

platforms and authoring tools. If a large team of Web de-

velopers works on the same Web project, “[t]he assets that

compose a Web site must be factored in a way that allows

many members of the Web team to make changes concur-

rently” (Nakano, 2002). The nature of Web content cre-

ation and authoring calls for user-friendlier version con-

trol and authoring tools.

Collaborative authoring is so tightly intertwined with

concurrent version control that it is difficult to discuss

one without mentioning the other. The concept of collab-

orative authoring encompasses a larger domain than ver-

sion control. In addition to varied skill levels, Web content

authors in a distributed environment often use different

authoring tools on various platforms. When they work on

the same project and need to share the same documents,

the version control system needs to be interoperable be-

sides accommodating different skill levels. To support col-

laborative authoring, the system needs to meet the re-

quirements of equal support for all content types, concur-

rency control support, support for metadata, support for

content-type independent links, retrieval of unprocessed

source for editing, namespace manipulation, and support

for collections (Whitehead, & Goland, 1999). In address-

ing these challenges, the Web Distributed Authoring and

Versioning (WebDAV) working group of the Internet En-

gineering Task Force (IETF) developed the WebDAV pro-

tocol in support of the remote collaborative authoring

on the Web (Goland, Whitehead, Faizi, Carter, & Jensen,

1999). Figure 2 demonstrates how authors in different lo-

cations using different authoring tools can edit the same

set of documents with WebDAV server’s version control

functions.