With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations.
ISBN 90 6196 502 0
Electronic copies of the thesis are available in readily printable PostScript (6.3Mb) and PDF versions (1.1Mb). For online reading, you might prefer the bookmarked and hyperlinked version (also in PDF).
The transparancies I used during the "exposé" are available in PowerPoint, PostScript and PDF.
The photos made by my parents and brother are (finally) available!