1. Historical background

1.1 Document, multimedia, hyperdocument and Web

The term document encompasses both the notion of content and that of container. To differentiate between them, we generally speak of the logical structure of a document to express its "semantic skeleton", and of its physical structure to qualify all its formatting characteristics. Historically, these two aspects of document modeling have been supported by the SGML (for structuring) and HTML (for presentation) standards.

A multimedia document is a document with at least two media (text, image, sound, etc.), and a hyperdocument is a generalization of the document concept (hypergraph structure). A hypermedia document is the fusion of these two concepts. While the first hypertext, which was in fact a system for managing...