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Over the last two years, we have built a web-based collaborative system TangoInteractive (http://www.webwisdom.com) which has been very successfully used for synchronous distance education.
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Key features of TangoInteractive were its well defined API to applications in any language and its powerful shared browser built around a JavaScript Interface.
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XML offers at least two important opportunities to advance this technology. Firstly the current shared HTML browser becomes a shared XML browser allowing custom style sheets on each collaborating client to present different views to each user. We are exploring this for distance education as a mechanism for universal access for both students and teachers of different capabilities and to support sessions where clients could simultaneously be PC's, palmtop and high end virtual environments such
as CAVE's.
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A second area where XML will play a key role is as the infrastructure with which to build collaborative web pages containing many different shared objects with both different functionalities and different collaboration configurations. In this talk we describe our prototype SPW (Shared Places on the Web) which we are building to explore both these ideas. The dynamic customizable configuration possibilities offered by this architecture, appears a dramatic improvement over current collaborative
models which tend to offer rather rigid collaboration capabilities and policies.
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