An Evolved Link-specification Language for Creating and Sharing Documents on the Web

International audienceMost search engines on the web require that the authors reference their pages themselves with online forms. The information they provide then allows the pages to be sorted in a kind of hypertext-thesaurus so as to render them as accessible as possible to the end user. Another way of accessing on-line documents is a free-text search on a list of words contained in the documents. So as to reduce the " noise " and " silence " that these search tools usually produce, one possible way is to add linguistic and documentary expertise in a way that is independent of the manner in which the documents are created. Another very promising avenue is to obtain the information used to search and share the documents at the same time as the document is created. We have come to believe that, for reasons which are both cognitive and technological, the hypertext links that are placed in a document by its author make up the best structure for later integrating end-user search tools. We have therefore come up with a formal high-level language for conceptually specifying links which would allow us to fulfill our aims, within the framework of the HTML standard