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Taking Advantage of the Multimedia Aspects of Mosaic

With the exception of the graphical maps, the group documents depended almost exclusively on what has been called ``Annotated Text'' [Weingrad et al.1993], documents consisting primarily of text with little additional hyperlinked media. Most of the students indicated a willingness to explore other media. However, incorporating media other than text adds the difficulty of obtaining and linking the information. While HTML provides a consistent link interface to all types of media, creating links within alternate media is more difficult. This problem is especially difficult when building graphic images in which different links should be accessed based on where a click occurs within the image. Group 2 built their interface entirely by hand, physically recording coordinates for links and then registering these coordinates with the server in order to make the node functional. Very little of this work is directly transferable to similar documents - such as the graphical map for the combined document. Thus, although the students wanted to incorporate alternate media in the group documents and in the combined document, without ready access to tools for manipulating alternate media that are similarly simple, straightforward and powerful as HTML-aware text editors, the extra effort did not seem worthwhile.


wrayre@eecs.umich.edu