Active Pages: Intelligent Nodes on the World Wide Web

Proceedings of the 1994 World Wide Web Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994.

Abstract

Active pages provide a common interface to World Wide Web applications, crossing browser, platform and operating system boundaries. They are hypertext documents that present a front-end to intelligent applications. Typically implemented as interpreted programs with an associated database, they use the forms extension for application input. There are four advantages to the active pages approach for application interfaces: widespread accessibility, support for collaborative work, self-documentation, and seamless integration with other Web pages. In this paper, we present our active page design methodology and demonstrate it with two examples from our server: WEBDNS, a facility for editing Internet Domain Name System master files; and The People Directory, an editable personnel database that includes hypertext links to biographical pages.

Keywords

collaborative applications, World Wide Web programs, user interfaces, portable applications

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