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Elements of hypermedia design
Gloor P., Birkhäuser Boston Inc., Cambridge, MA, 1997. Type: Book (9780817639112)
Date Reviewed: Oct 1 1997

Despite the title’s apparent claim to generality, this book is essentially a report on the different projects that its author has been involved in over the last ten years or so. Two in particular are covered in detail: animating the algorithms found in Cormen et al. [1] and producing a series of multimedia conference proceedings. Although some of the ideas presented may prove useful, it is hard to imagine the intended audience. The coverage of general topics is too superficial for the book to serve as a textbook, while there is little technical detail that might be useful to researchers. Furthermore, although they are only a few years old, some of the projects described already feel dated. We used to write applications in HyperCard augmented with XCMDs, but do we still?

The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 lists seven concepts for navigation in cyberspace: indexing, searching, sequentialization, hierarchy, similarity, mapping, and agents. Part 2 describes some tools for editing hypermedia documents. Part 3 reports some experiments in algorithm animation. Part 4 presents a multimedia editing system written by the author. Part 5 is an account of the production of a series of multimedia conference proceedings.

The styles of the different parts vary. Part 1 reads rather like the obligatory literature survey one finds at the beginning of many a doctoral thesis. Much of the text reads as though it has been taken verbatim from abstracts or publicity material (“Hyper-G is a technically superior information server”). At the other extreme, Part 4 contains a series of program fragments written in Scheme. Many chapters are irritatingly short. Chapter 36, for example, is just 23 lines long, while several others consist of less than 40 lines. There are numerous figures, but many of them (Figures I.42 and I.75, for example) add nothing to the discussion.

Physically, the book shows every sign of being homemade. The typography is unattractive, and examples of sloppy editing abound.

Reviewer:  Paul Bratley Review #: CR120896 (9710-0770)
1) Cormen, T. H.; Leiserson, C. E.; and Rivest, R. L. Introduction to algorithms. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990.
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Hypertext/ Hypermedia (I.7.2 ... )
 
 
Animations (H.5.1 ... )
 
 
Hypertext Navigation And Maps (H.5.1 ... )
 
 
Retrieval Models (H.3.3 ... )
 
 
World Wide Web (WWW) (H.3.4 ... )
 
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