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"four types of hypermedia controls found in HTML: links (anchors), forms, image tags and iframes" "Examining the hypermedia control mechanic of links, forms, image
tags and iframes in HTML, we see the following common functional
pattern emerge:
For each of these controls:
(1) An event trigger (click, submit or load)
(2) Causes a particular type of HTTP request issuance
(3) That request is made to a resource location specified by a
URL
(4) The content of the HTTP response is then placed in the user
agent viewport
Within the context of HTML, this gives us the following functional definition of hypermedia controls as an element that incorporates this hypermedia control mechanic:
Definition 4.1 (Hypermedia Control). A hypermedia control is
an element that responds to an event trigger by issuing a type of
request to a URL and placing the response at some position within
the user agents viewport." They mention the limitations of these existing hypermedia controls within HTML. In general, existing HTML controls don't allow the developer to choose any type of HTTP request to be sent from any type of HTML element and target any part of the page. "in the absence of an extension
mechanism hypermedia clients and servers must agree in advance
on the types of hypermedia controls they will support.
HTML includes a very powerful extension mechanism: JavaScript
[47 ]. By taking advantage of this extension mechanism we are able
to extend HTML and provide the generalized hypermedia controls
outlined above to HTML authors." "CONCLUSION
In this paper we proposed an informal and then definition of the
term "hypermedia control", derived from the implementations of
four common such controls found in HTML: anchors, forms, im-
ages and iframes. From this formal definition we then derived a
generalization of the concept of hypermedia controls within the
context of HTML.
We then introduced htmx, a JavaScript library that implements
these generalizations for HTML authors. We demonstrated two interactive patterns that can be implemented by HTML authors using
generalized hypermedia controls. Finally, we introduced Hyperview, a mobile hypermedia that also implements the generalization
we proposed. We demonstrated an interactive pattern achievable
in Hyperview using this generalization, thus demonstrating that
this generalization applies to hypermedia systems beyond HTML
and the WWW." |