Once a document has comments and other links embedded, traversing and managing these links requires little more than a button click. Comment review and management consists of four primary activities in CASCADE.
Each of these options is discussed briefly below. As was the case with link insertion, actions two and three -- rating, or deletion of comments -- will be reported to the activity log and other group members will be informed of the action.
Navigating Links Any button that appears in the document display window is an active link to a document or comment. If the button displays the name of the person, it means that person has made a comment at that point in the document. (As described above, links may be man usually named, in which case something other than a user name will appear on some buttons.) By clicking with the RIGHT mouse button on a link button the user will display the comment or other document. In reality, much more will happen. As the user move around via these links, the history and directory area will be updated in an effort to provide the kind of navigational help the user might want. In addition, CASCADE will be moving through the document hierarchy in an effort to make sure that other document components the user might be interested in are available. For example, when the user traverse a comment link, CASCADE moves its focus to the subdirectory where all the comments on that document are stored. In this way, the user can easily look at the other comments or the parent document.
To ease returning to the parent, CASCADE puts a `back to parent' button at the beginning of every comment. CASCADE supports two techniques for returning to the parent-- the `back' button and the history list. The back button is easiest, but will place the user at the top of the parent document while the history list will return the use to the position ther user left in the parent document.