Web-intrinsic interactive documents

Abstract

Modern interactive documents are complex applications that give the user the editing experience of editing a document as it will look in its final visual form. Sections of the document can be either editable, or read-only, and can dynamically conform artifacts like images to specific users. The components underlying interactive documents are dynamically bound variables and a complex rule engine for adapting the document as the user edits. Web interactive documents deliver the dynamic editing experience through the web by using a web browser for deploying the editor. Document editors built-in the web browser as a native application provide a higher quality editing experience because the editor's look and feel is consistent with the web browser's innate controls and navigation. The majority of traditional interactive documents have been developed using proprietary formats which are not compatible with today's web browser implementations because they were originally intended as desk-top applications. As a consequence, traditional interactive documents are not inherently web applications. This talk will provide an overview of the technical challenges faced in developing a web-intrinsic interactive document solution that simultaneously addresses the need for simple, yet rich, user editing features combined with the scalability, and ease of deployment, demanded by enterprises today. By way of example, I will introduce, and demonstrate, a new interactive document representation and deployment model. A prerequisite for such representations is that they enable documents to account for traditional document roles and still behave as intrinsic web content for document interaction. Another is that they are also able to support conventional enterprise workflows and complex processes, e.g. approvals, audit, versioning, storage and archival.