DAPHNE – A Tool for Distributed Web Authoring and Publishing

Web authoring and publishing in organizations / enterprises has become a more and more important and complex task. It has become a distributed, collaborative process performed by many users with less or even no HTML knowledge. In order to support this process, i.e., to facilitate the creation of websites and to maintain their usability and consistency, Web authoring and publishing systems are frequently asked for. In this paper, a Web authoring and publishing system, the DAPHNE (Distributed Authoring and Publishing in a Hypertext and Networked Environment) system, will be introduced. Based on metadata management and standard Internet technologies, DAPHNE offers many interesting features. Most importantly, DAPHNE allows a high openness from the system viewpoint as well as a high flexibility for authors: no HTML knowledge will be required users can edit documents by using the editing tools they are familiar with and which exist in their current computing environment. DAPHNE will automatically generate a dynamic version of a well-structured website as well as a set of well-structured static HTML files. By employing subject headings the structural element of DAPHNEDAPHNE allows to support a navigation structure of high usability and a standard layout of the website as well. In this paper, following a brief introduction to DAPHNE's system architecture and design principles, DAPHNE'S key features, new developments of DAPHNE, especially those regarding integration of a workflow for management of multilingual websites and the possibility of building a document/knowledge management system using DAPHNE , will be addressed. A discussion on Web authoring and publishing in organizations / enterprises will be given as well.