AESOP: an outline-oriented authoring system

Because a hypermedia document is more complex than conventional text, it requires preparation with respect to two key aspects. First, the author begins to develop a “vision” of the document-usually based on some outline level description of his objectives. At the same time as this outline is being developed, the author begins to extract useful segments from his resource materials and prepares his first version of the logic of a system of hyperlinks among those segments. We present a system named “Authoring Environment for the Desktop” (AESOP) with two different types of “outlining” tools to handle these aspects. Planning the “vision” consists in defining a “logical” tree structure of the document. The plan for the link structure is based on a primitive unit called the view area, and AESOP provides a construct named Bento-Box for crating and manipulating view areas. Authors specify spatial and temporal layout within a single Bento-Box and define hyperlinks among the Bento-Boxes