Anchors

Anchors represent parts of graphic objects which may be the sources or destinations of links. Here follows a general description of thir implementation in the WWW architecure. (See definition)

An anchor be the source of no, one, or many links. It has one "main" link for the (common) case in which it is the source for one link. (In the w3 software, only the main link is normally used - jan 92)

An anchor may be the destination of no, one, or many links. The anchor module stores all links known by the program, and so in fact manages a copy of a small part of the web.

There are two types of anchors: Parenet anchors and child anchors.

Parent anchors

These represent whole documents. Every graphic object has an associated parent anchor. Associated with a parent anchor is data including:

The title of the associated document, if known. This allows the document's title to be displayed in lists of previous nodes visited, etc., even when the document itself has been freed.
A flag as to whether the document is an index.
The address of the document. When a new anchor is created, the code ensures that if an anchor with that address already exists, that that anchor is returned instead, so no duplicates can exist.
A list of children

Child anchors

These represent parts of documents. The graphic object stores the correlation between the id of the anchor and the actual space (time) shape which is referred to. Child anchors contain

A pointer to the parent.

_________________________________________________________________

Tim BL