18.2 Enabling CYBERMAP for the Web

Obviously the CYBERMAP concepts can be ideally applied to World Wide Web documents. We therefore wanted to be able to use CYBERMAP for navigation on the web. The first web port of CYBERMAP was straightforward, albeit limited to the Macintosh.

We maintained the CM-2 clustering backend, and combined the HyperCard/C CYBERMAP GUI with AppleScript-aware Web browsers such as Netscape. It took only a few days to replace the HyperCard-browsing mechanism with a web browser: Instead of calling a HyperCard card, CYBERMAP sends a GetURL Apple event [Goo94] to the browser which then loads the next HTML file.

Figure I.93 Web-enabled Mac CYBERMAP

Figures I.93 and I.94 illustrate browsing the web using the original, web-enabled CYBERMAP on the Macintosh. As can be seen, the GUI part could be taken from the Mac implementation with minor modifications, while the generation of the CYBERMAP structure was done off-line on the CM-2 using the clustering system described in the previous section.

Figure I.94 Browsing the Web on the Mac using the original CYBERMAP

Obviously, this solution is not really satisfactory, as the GUI is limited to the Macintosh. Also, because of the limited availability of the CM-2, we were planning on porting the clustering part to a more portable platform anyway. We therefore decided to build a web version that would run with any Java-capable web browser on all major hardware platforms.