Personal Glossaries on the WWW:
An Exploratory Study (Hypertext)

The article has two main entry points:

  1. the traditional title page, and
  2. the site map cum table of contents.

All of the files are linked to from the article's table of contents (see link above) and you may also load them all from the directory view.

A list of contents for this document is near the end of this document.



All of the article's files are available as a single file: DocEng04-s30--2004-11-09.tar.gz

That file is an Unix tar archive compressed with gzip.



Technical Overview

If your browser is not rendering the article in a sensible way (for example two pieces of text lie atop each other, sections are obviously missing, or nothing is displayed when you load a file) then you should read the section below entitled Browsers that do work.

Summary metadata for the article is in the section entitled Metadata below.


1. Cross-Browser Compatibility

This technical overview document is written in basic HTML (version 2.0) for maximum portability while still maintaining WWW hypertext links.

The article Towards Hypertextual Glossaries is written in XHTML (version 1.0 strict) and Cascading Style Sheets (version 2.0) for presentation by World Wide Web browsers.

We designed the article to conform to modern World Wide Web Consortium standards so that it could be properly rendered by as many browsers as possible, now and in the future. We chose to use Cascading Style Sheets and tags to make our meaning clearer without confounding pure content with presentational markup. Technical details about some of the markup used can be found in the file at Content/A-technical.html.

Unfortunately some older Web browsing software does not conform to the principles of `graceful degredation' and `progressive enhancement' that have been central to Web standards since the early days. We have confirmed that the documents that make up our article render well in Internet Explorer for Macintosh (version 5.2) and even better in Netscape for Macintosh (version 7.1). The BrowserPhoto service from NetMechanics.com revealed serious problems with Internet Explorer version 4.5 on an iMac and Netscape 6.1 on a Windows-based computer. However some earlier and later versions of those same browsers did not have such serious problems (although the display was, in our opinion, aesthetically lacking).

Browsers that do work

If the display (or audio rendering) of the article is such that text is obviously missing or impossible to read, then we recommend disabling CSS support in your browser. However if that does not resolve the issue then we suggest that you switch to one of the following browsers that do render the document properly:

2. Metadata

The Dublin Core metadata in Resource Description Format (RDF) is in the Content/MetaData/metadata_DC.rdf file.

Some of the details about the article are:

Article Title
Personal Glossaries on the WWW: An Exploratory Study
Article Authors
James Blustein & Mona Noor
Corresponding Author's Addresses
Postal
James Blustein
Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University
6050 University Avenue
Halifax, Nova Scotia
B3H 1W5
Canada
Electronic mail (Internet)
<jamie@cs.dal.ca>
Fax (requires a cover sheet)
+1 902 492-1517
Office telephone
+1 902 494-6104

Contents


What next?