Addressing Publishing Issues with Hypermedia Distributed on the Web

The content and structure of an electronically published document can be authored and processed in ways that allow for flexibility in presentation on different environments for different users. This enables authors to craft documents that are more widely presentable. Electronic publishing issues that arise from this separation of document storage from presentation include (1) respecting the intent and restrictions of the author and publisher in the document’s presentation, and (2) applying costs to individual document components and allowing the user to choose among alternatives to control the price of the document’s presentation. These costs apply not only to the individual media components displayed but also to the structure created by document authors to bring these media components together as multimedia. A collection of ISO standards, primarily SGML, HyTime and DSSSL, facilitate the representation of presentation-independent documents and the creation of environments that process them for presentation. SMIL is a W3C format under development for hypermedia documents distributed on the World Wide Web. Since SMIL is SGML-compliant, it can easily be incorporated into SGML/HyTime and DSSSL environments. This paper discusses how to address these issues in the context of presentation-independent hypermedia storage. It introduces the Berlage environment, which uses SGML, HyTime, DSSSL and SMIL to store, process, and present hypermedia data. This paper also describes how the Berlage environment can be used to enforce publisher restrictions on media content and to allow users to control the pricing of document presentations. Also explored is the ability of both SMIL and HyTime to address these issues in general, enabling SMIL and HyTime systems to consistently process documents of different document models authored in different environments.