Design for All as a Challenge for Hypermedia Engineering

Design for All is an important challenge for hypermedia engineering. We analyze this challenge and show that it is necessary to find a way of describing partially designed hypermedia documents that can then be transformed into different hypermedia applications according to user needs and call this concept “semi-documents”. We sketch similarities and differences to existing formalisms and conclude that there are three areas in which functional languages can make a contribution: the development of an embedded special-purpose language for describing semi-documents, the building of generators which produce hypermedia applications from semi-documents, and the realization of support tools for the development of semi-documents.