This document specifies the draft for the Open Hypermedia Systems' Protocol (OHP). Distribution of this document is unlimited. Comments are welcome at H.C.Davis@ecs.soton.ac.uk. For discussions about the protocol as well as Open Hypermedia Systems in general see also the OHS Mailing List and the OHS Working Group Home Page.
2. Abstract
OHP is a protocol which allows a client side application program to communicate with server side programs about the basic hypertext objects, namely anchors, links, nodes, scripts and presentations.
Currently, open hypermedia systems tend to support only their private protocol, and as a result each system developer must also develop client side applications to talk in this protocol, which is a significant task.
An application program which talks in OHP will be able to talk to any linkserver, on the internet for example, about hypertext objects. Currently this would be achieved by providing some shim program which would translate between OHP and the linkserver's native protocol. This means that once an application had been developed for some client architecture, it would be able to work with all linkservices. Similarly, programs with macro languages could be adapted to talk OHP.
However, the OHP protocol, if adopted, should lead to a new generation of linkservers, which would themselves be OHP compliant. We envisage that the community could use OHP as the basis for producing tools for a new generation of distributed linkservers and client applications on the internet, in much the same way as http defined the World Wide Web.
This paper describes Revision 2.0 of this protocol.