Interactive applications or documents such as those appearing on the World Wide Web (WWW) containing hypertext need to contain a large amount of information to enable the interactivity. Hypertext is the organization of information units into connected associations that a user can choose to make. An instance of such an association is called a link and may be a hypertext link, for example. The information associated with each link is often stored within the document itself and the target information associated with each link can again have more links associated with it.
Each document can have any number of interactive points such as these links and others and is continuing to increase with the complexity and availability of digital information. The storage and retrieval of such information is of importance because the efficiency of providing interactive documents and applications with a large number of interactive points is often dependant on how large the interactive document is. This is compounded when the interactive documents are dynamically generated so that the number of permutations becomes unmanageable. One solution has been to store all of the needed information in the interactive document itself. This suffers due to the bloat in the document size making it undesirable to distribute.
In this regard, there is a need for efficient ways to provide interactive documents in a manner that reduces the bloat in document size.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds