The rendering mechanism plays an indispensable role in browser-based Web application. It generates active webpages dynamically and provides human-readable layout through template engines, which are used as a standard programming model to separate the business logic and data computations from the webpage presentation. The client-side rendering mechanism, owing to the advances of rich application technologies, has been widely adopted. The adoption of client side rendering brings not only various merits but also new problems. In this paper, we propose and construct “pagelet”, a segment-based template engine for developing flexible and extensible Web applications. By presenting principles, practice and usage experience of pagelet, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of possible advantages and disadvantages brought by client-side rendering mechanism from the viewpoints of both developers and end-users.

Current Web authentication frameworks have well-known weaknesses. HTTP provides an access authentication framework, but it is rarely used because it lacks presentational control. Forms and cookies, which are most commonly used, have the long-standing privacy issue raised by tracking. URI sessions, which are used in some mobile services like i-mode 1.0, disclose session identifiers unintentionally. This paper proposes iAuth, which integrates better parts of the existing frameworks and fixes their problems; iAuth allows servers to provide log-in forms, and introduces a session header to avoid servers' tracking and unintentional disclosure. Since iAuth has backward compatibility with the major legacy browsers, developers can freely introduce iAuth into their Web sites or browsers as needed. Experiments confirm its correct operation; an iAuth server is shown to support not only an iAuth client but major legacy browsers. We believe that iAuth will resolve the long-standing issues in Web authentication.

In this letter we suggest sets of features to classify genres of web documents. Web documents are different from textual documents in that they contain URL and HTML tags within the pages. We introduce the features specific to web documents, which are extracted from URL and HTML tags. Experimental results enable us to evaluate their characteristics and performances. On the basis of the experimental results, we implement a user interface of a web search engine that presents documents grouped by genres.

We can easily access a remote database as well as a local database with HTML forms. Although implementing a database application with HTML forms is much simpler than implementing it with a proprietary graphical user-interface system, HTML forms and CGI programs still must be coded. We implemented a software tool that automatically generates the SQL statements that create a database for an application, the forms that are used as a user interface, and the Java servlets that retrieve the data requested through the forms. The database tables to be created and the forms to be generated are determined by the class diagram for the application. Our software tool, which we call WebSiteGen, thus simplifies the implementation of a Web-based database application.

The Web is a collection of multimedia documents in the form of HTML pages connected through hyperlinks. Unlike most search engines, which focus on information retrieval based on keywords, WebDB aims at supporting database-like comprehensive query functionalities as well navigation, and document generation functionalities with customizability. To support hypermedia database functionalities, we augment the traditional concepts of tables in relational databases and classes in object-oriented databases with notions of document formats and navigation. We design WQL (Web Query Language) as an HTML document manipulation language. WQL language statements contain two parts: SELECT. . . FROM. . . WHERE clauses for specifying retrieval of data contents from hypermedia databases and CREATE. . . AS. . . clauses for specifying the output HTML format and navigation of the query results. This paper presents the architecture of WebDB and its functionalities. The extension to SQL for hypermedia document manipulation, query, and navigation and implementation on NEC PERCIO OODBMS are described in detail.

We proposed a graphical user interface (GUI) that provides users with multimedia information, including dynamic images. On the Internet, there are many WWW browsers that read the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As various browsers extend the HTML tags and attributes independently to expand and/or improve layout, the HTML compatibility between browsers is lost. We have developed a WWW browser to solve this problem. Our browser presents all multimedia information, including text, images, and dynamic images as a block and renders them without the need to extend the HTML specifications. It independently interprets and draws HTML objects using a layout manager. It has a layout rule, and manages the hierarchical data structure and the block data of HTML documents. This browser also allows layout-rule changes. The layout manager efficiently displays information while checking the available display area size. The structure of this browser is such that the portion that manages the formatting of the document is separated from the portion that displays the individual parts. In this browser, the layout rule allows text to be placed around an image without the need to modify the existing HTML contents. It is also relatively easy to change the presentation of multiple screens, such as a two-page book-like layout or the conventional single-page scroll-bar format by changing the layout rule. The incorporation of media decoders into the browser enables the displaying of various multimedia information, such as sounds, pictures, and moving images.