http://www.cern.ch/Light/ (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)Programmers who develop, use, maintain, modify software are faced with the problem of scanning and understanding large amounts of documents, ranging from source code to requirements, analysis and design diagrams, user and reference manuals, etc. This task is non trivial and time consuming, because of the number and size of documents, and the many implicit cross-references that they contain. In large distributed development teams, where software and related documents are produced at various sites, the problem can be even more severe.
LIGHT, LIfe cycle Global HyperText, is an attempt to solve the problem using WWW technology. The basic idea is to make all the software documents, including code, available on the WWW, with all cross-references automatically established. For instance a click on an external subroutine call in the code takes you to its documentation, a click on a data element leads to the corresponding data definition, etc.