Structured Cooperative Authoring for the World Wide Web

Alliance is a structured cooperative authoring application that allowspeople spread out across different locations to work together on documentproduction and maintenance. It uses the World Wide Web as an infrastructureto accomplish distributed document management, asynchronous group awareness,and communication and cooperation among distributed authors. A particularfeature of Alliance is that it can handle temporary disconnections from thenetwork without disrupting the cooperative editing. In this article wereport our experience in designing and implementing Alliance, focusing onthe mechanisms that needed to be developed in order to support cooperativeauthoring using the Web.