Multimedia Authoring and Presentation

Abstract

With the rapid advance of the Internet and Web technology, an increasing amount of graphs and media contents are delivered on the Web. On-line multimedia presentations, such as news, need to be constantly updated. The content and the presentation structure of an on-line multimedia presentation may also be frequently updated. At the client side, there are various kinds of viewing conditions, such as varying screen size, style preference, and different device capabilities. For example, consider a diagram representing an organizational structure on the Web that may be of considerable complexity occupying a large screen space, and thus may be unsuitable for small displays (Marriott et al. 2002). Thus, if the diagram is to be viewed on the screen of a mobile device, such as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), the original diagram layout may not be appropriate. Another example is a news Web site, which generally needs to be constantly updated with the incoming news items. Such a site may have to adapt itself frequently to the changing space and style requirements for different news categories. The ability of dynamically adapting its layout would be highly desirable. There are also increasing demands for accessing on-line multimedia documents from mobile devices such as PDas.