• Summary
• Related Documents
  • Active Bibliography
  • Co-citation
• Version History

Abstract:

As the size of hypermedia applications grows, it is clear that we need better tools for the designer to deal with their growing complexity. Formal languages allow the unambiguous description of the properties of a system without restricting their implementation. They can become the foundation for tool support in the design stage; these tools could then be used to verify properties about the design such as completeness, type-consistency or the characteristics of the corresponding navigation graph. We present in this paper HadeZ, a formal specification language for hypertext design. Based--as its counterpart Z and Object Z-- in set theory, it is a mechanism to specify the data that composes an application and how its attributes are collated into hypermedia pages and therefore cross-linked. The aim of HadeZ is to unambiguously specify the design of an application without stating anything about how it must be implemented (what kind of repository to use, whether to use HTML or another platform), or the final look-and-feel of it (what colours, what size of type) and to allow the designer to verify properties (such as the ones mentioned above) of a given design. 1

Citations