Define entities--and other alien creatures
Entities are objects that exist only to
point to other objects, such as special characters, blocks of boilerplate
text, an image file, audio, or video.
If you have some boilerplate description of your company, and you want to
drop that into many different web pages, you may want to create an entity.
An entity is a placeholder, pointing to the description.
In this way, you can modify the original text once, and have it populate
the rest of your pages, without having to go to each page, and fix it.
Entities are special objects, because during processing they are replaced
by whatever they point to:
Specify
your syndicated content
The best syndicated content comes with its own information model,
expressed in a DTD or schema, and articulated with XML tags.
If you want
to transform this material, you need to make up a new model, using their
elements.
Your programming team must write specs for any new functions you expect to
plug into your site, such as currency converters, price calculators. You
need information such as:
Related articles:
Form for Modeling an Object (PDF)
Complexity theory as a way of understanding the Web
Structuring complex interactive information
Modeling information in electronic space
