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Abstraction Levels in Web Document Formats

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Digital Documents: Systems and Principles (PODDP 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2023))

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Abstract

The paper gives an overview of current and emerging document formats on the Web, and discusses the abstraction level of the different formats. The “ladder of abstraction” is introduced as a measuring stick for Web formats, and various levels from presentation (at the bottom of the ladder) to semantics (at the top) is described. The importance of reaching certain abstraction levels in order to support device-independent formats, universal accessibility, and scalable presentations is stressed. The document formats discussed in the paper are: HTML, PDF, GIF, PNG, MathML, and XSL-FO. Also, the effect of style and transformation languages (namely CSS and XSLT) are described.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Opera Software, Oslo, Norway

    Håkon Wium Lie

Authors
  1. Håkon Wium Lie
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba, R3T 2N2, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Peter King

  2. Department of EECS, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 53201, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Ethan V. Munson

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lie, H.W. (2004). Abstraction Levels in Web Document Formats. In: King, P., Munson, E.V. (eds) Digital Documents: Systems and Principles. PODDP 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2023. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39916-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39916-2_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21070-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39916-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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