Design and implementation of a simple multimedia specification language for the internet

The format of a multimedia document raises more and more concerns as distributed multimedia documents become attractive. This leads to the research in standardizing a multimedia interchange format, such as HyTime and MHEG. However, these standards are not widely accepted in the applications due to their complications. On the other hand, there are lots of commercial multimedia authoring systems in the market. Most of them are designed for the desktop rather than the distributed network. This thesis presents a Simple Multimedia Specification Language (SMSL). The language is simple, text-based and designed to allow the information of a multimedia document to be stored distributely. Also, the authors can define user interactions in a document. Furthermore, the language is extensible, since it allows user-defined actions to be included in a document, and dynamically executed during the presentation. In order to allow the users to read and publish the SMSL documents on the World Wide Web, the SMSL document browser is implemented as a Java Applet and embedded in a web page. Thus, the users can read an SMSL document by visiting the web page through any Java-compatible web browsers, such as Netscape. The SMSL is suitable for practical use, as is demonstrated by distance learning and TOEFL exam examples. Further work is needed in a variety of areas, such as hypermedia and transmission specifications.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat