IV. Hypermedia Publishing

"Writing a book is like creating a wave you can surf on; writing a CD-ROM is more like making a box of chocolates. .... Like the chocolates, in the end, the taste and the texture matter more than words."

-- The Economist, [Eco95]

It should be obvious by now that hypermedia publishing is a multifaceted task that involves activities in many different domains. As an exemplary application involving the whole spectrum of the hypermedia creation and authoring process the last part of this book presents issues and obstacles encountered while producing a series of multimedia conference proceedings. The DAGS conference proceedings have initially been produced for dissemination on CD-ROM; with the advent of the Information Superhighway the latest proceedings have been published on the web. We believe that multimedia conference proceedings provide an exceptional testbed for hypermedia publishing, highlighting many pending research issues that must be resolved before similar projects can be quickly and inexpensively accomplished.