Multicard: an open hypermedia system

This paper describes the Multicard hypermedia system which has been developed following an open systems approach. Multieard provides a hypermedia toolkit that allows programmers to create and manipulate distributed basic hypermedia structures; an interactive authoringhavigation tool which is itself based on the toollki~ an advanced scripting languagty a multimedia composition editor, as well as a communication protocol that allows the integration of various editors and applications into a single hypermedia network. One of Multieard's features is that it does not itself handle the contents of the nodes. Instead, it eormnunieates with different editors, mming as separate processes, using a set of messages called the M2000 protocol. Multieard has so far been connected in this way to around five different M2000 compliant editors and applications ranging from a basic text editor and data sheet to sophisticated desktop publishing and multimedia composition systems. M2000 mmpliant editors automatically benefit of the Multieard linking facilities and composite structures. Using the Multicard scripting language, M2000 compliant editors ean also annotate their contents with scripts and communicate with each other using event and message transmission. Pertnission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requim.s a fee and/or specific permission.