Multivalent Documents: Inducing Structure and Behavior

Digital documents have advanced only slightly from their non-digital ancestors, incorporating a few such innovations as hypertext links andfull text searching. Even the much heralded advent of multimedia, just as embedded images and video clips, are rather straightforward digital analogs of books and frim. We believe that computer technology makes possible far more interesting and complex digital documents, and propose a new general paradigm that regards complex documents as “multivalent documents ” comprising multiple “layers ” of distinct but intimately related content. Small, dynamically-loaded program objects, or “behaviors”, activate the content and work in concert with each other and layers of content to support arbitrarily specialized document types. Behavior