Supporting Hierarchical Guided Tours in the World Wide Web

Guided tours are well known from hypertext systems as a means to collect hypertext documents in a sequence with a certain meaning. This can be followed by readers using next and previous links. As there is almost no support for guided tours in the World Wide Web so far, these structures have to be built up manually, which not only causes a lot of work on updates but is also almost impossible in the case of non-local documents. This paper presents a simple server-side concept for building guided tours using any existing Web pages. The pages used within a tour need not be aware of being used, and thus, need no special preparation at all. Pages may occur multiple times within several tours or even within one tour. We present a server-based implementation demonstrating the concept.