Navigation and Discovery

The most characteristic navigation method for the World Wide Web is the hyperlink as supported by HTML. The XML specification, in contrast, does not define a navigation method. Originally, the World Wide Web was designed as a huge library. The protocol for the Web, http:, was designed for the collaborative authoring of documents. Often, the logical relations that exist between information items in a conceptual model or a presentation-neutral XML implementation are misunderstood as navigation structures. The hypertext model defines one or more hypertexts that can be published in the site. Each different hypertext defines a site view, which in turn consists of two submodels. The composition model specifies which Webpages belong to a hypertext and which content units belong to a Webpage. The navigation model describes the navigational structure of a hypertext, that is, how pages and units are linked together. The presentation model describes the layout and graphic appearance of pages by means of an abstract XML syntax. The personalization model describes users and user groups.