Welcome to MetaWeb, an experimental site at Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication & Culture. As the name implies, MetaWeb is more than just an average web site -- it's really a web site for the maintenance and administration of web sites. MetaWeb provides form-based tools for the revision and maintenance of large, structured World Wide Web sites.
Picture a large, inclusive web site for a corporation or educational institution; one that provides standardized pages linked to each division of the corporation, each employee of the institution, or each product in the company's sales line. These pages may require updates at a constant rate or only at irregular intervals, but it is vital to the design of the site that each new revision maintain the look and feel of the site's interface.
How then can a Web site designer turn over the maintenance of the site to many different users (of varying technical skill levels) and rest assured that no elements will be missed and no liberties taken with the logical structure of each page? The tools of MetaWeb meet this challenge directly.
MetaWeb allows site administrators to delegate responsibility for page maintenance to the individual user, while still retaining control over the appearance and design of the finished page. It accomplishes this through the interaction between HTML forms, accessible on the Web itself, and pre-formatted HTML templates that reside on the server. Users access MetaWeb through a password protected page on the server, pick the page they want to update from a menu, and fill out simple forms to revise the information content.
MetaWeb utilizes a series of CGI scripts that accept user input via common HTML 2.0 forms. Though there are several different iterations of these CGI scripts, they all share a common method of operation: Each script receives input from a form and applies the information to a template that contains the web designer's HTML code. In effect, MetaWeb allows the designer to separate content from presentation enough to allow the user to provide one and the designer the other.
Once the information has been inserted into the template, applying paragraph tags and other formatting as needed, a preview is displayed to show how the new web page will look. After inspection, the user has the option of installing the new page or returning to the form to further edit the information. Throughout this process, the user need not enter a single HTML tag. However, the MetaWeb forms do allow HTML-savvy users to augment the information with embedded HTML tags, which will be included in the installed page.
MetaWeb is both secure and convenient. Security is enforced via
the web server's own user authentication system. Individual users
are granted unique access to their material via a username and
password. Users can access the MetaWeb services via an unobtrusive
that
appears at the foot of every MetaWeb-editable page on the site.
But this access is keyed to the user's unique password, so only
those users who have the proper access privileges will be allowed
within MetaWeb's secured realm, and they will only be permitted
to edit those pages for which they have explicit permission.
Additionally, users are prevented from directly modifying the HTML
templates and forms that create their pages -- they only edit
the content.
Here are some excerpts of comments we've recieved about MetaWeb:
| Bryce Glass and Mark Johnson's MetaWeb, an experimental Web site that provides easy tools for changing and maintaining larger WWW sites, was excellent ... MetaWeb was one of the more utilitarian applications and addressed all the security and simplicity issues that surround building web sites. | |
|
Eileen Bien Atlanta Computer Currents April, 1996 |
|
| Clearly your site is an extremely inventive one, and one with a real-world sense of application. This is an example of a new class of sites that involve the manipulation of html automatically to achieve various ends. A mark of your site's inventiveness is the fact that the metaweb idea is not only useful in itself, but also suggests other uses and similar applications... | |
|
Jay David Bolter Author of Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Laurence Erlbaum, 1991) |
|
Certainly! Follow this link for a demonstration of the process that a user would go through to revise a page on a MetaWeb enhanced site. Sign on as a guest to create your own biography page on the Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication & Culture's Web Site.
For more detailed information about the MetaWeb system, come take a look at the MetaWeb Proof of Concept document.
© Copyright 1996, Johnson & Glass. All rights reserved.