A Markup System for Shared HTML Documents

Advances in the World Wide Web technology made an immense amount of multimedia information available to the desktop. As a natural consequence of this easy access to a global information infrastructure, several Web co-browsing systems have been recently introduced [1, 5, 9]. In such systems, several participants join a conference during which they navigate the Internet exploring its resources together.

In this paper, we present a shared markup system that is designed specifically to support Web co-browsing. Based on the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) [3], the markup system is interoperable across different platforms and Web browsers. It allows for online annotation, of share HTML documents, directly inside the browser's windows. The annotations created by the markup system are realized using HTML components that are composed dynamically. The mechanisms used for controlling the browsers' environments and synchronizing the views of the participants to a consistant view are also described.