What we want from WWW as a distributed multimedia system

WWW is used increasingly for dealing with large amounts of multimedia data. Unfortunately early WWW concepts are not particularly supportive of such kinds of applications. The simple link paradigm of ordinary WWW does not handle links in arbitrary document types, or multiple views of the same document space and does not support automatic link maintenance. Nor is the link concept powerful enough to handle complex structural requirements in distributed databases. The author defines the scope of multimedia. They then discuss features needed in a distributed multimedia system and why some of them are difficult to implement in ordinary WWW systems. They finally show that WWW systems that generalise the link concept and introduce additional structuring mechanisms to handle the problems discussed can be and have indeed been developed: they explain some of the relevant points using as an example the most prominent such system, Hyperwave.