20.3 Migration to Hyper-G

Hyper-G is like Gopher a hypermedia system that lets you structure your information. A directory dealing with file systems in FTP or Gopher is called a ``collection'' in Hyper-G. A collection is some kind of ordered list of entries. Because these entries are also allowed to be collections, you can create a real collection hierarchy. The second type in Hyper-G for structuring information is the ``cluster.'' It lets you create multi-language documents, ``cluster'' several kinds of multimedia documents together (for example, a video clip and a textual description), or even hide documents like remote links or inline images inside. If you want to know more about structuring information using Hyper-G, refer to Chapter 22. For getting more information on collections and clusters in the sense of object types, refer to Chapters 9, 10 and 11.

Usually because of the structuring possibilities provided by Hyper-G a Hyper-G server contains information in a much more structured way than WWW servers do. Therefore, if you want to ``roll over'' from WWW to Hyper-G, you will have to structure your data in some way:

The easiest way is just to put all your HTML documents into one collection and add the attribute PresentationHints=FullCollectionHead to your start document, contained within the collection. If users browse the collection, they will only see the start document. Even with a Hyper-G viewer they will not get to the underlying collections (if there are any), unless they explicitly open the collection (for example, by using the ``c''-shortcut with Harmony). Treating WWW to Hyper-G conversion this way is easy, but you would then have decided that you do not want to use some of the most powerful features of Hyper-G.
Another way to structure your information is to do it by hand. Of course this means that you have some work to do, but if you do it right, it will save you much work in the future. If you want to know more about how one should structure information systems and what advantages this concept provides for both the user and the system administrator, see Chapter 22.
The best way to start (if you do not want to invest a lot of time into thinking about what collections to create in which way) is maybe to use the loadwww utility. This tool was designed to insert a whole hyperweb of interlinked HTML and other multimedia data automatically into a Hyper-G server.

20.3.1 The loadwww tool
20.3.2 HTML in Hyper-G
20.3.3 Reusing your ``old WWW URLs