The multimedia repaving of the World Wide Web is under way with tools like the Java programming language, the Shockwave multimedia player, and the Acrobat portable document format.
All hope to put the "activity" into interactivity on the Web.
But these goodies come at a price - and I'm not talking about minor details like bandwidth requirements. No, this is serious. How are we going to find stuff?
Today, with search engines like Alta Vista, you can type in some keywords and get back a list of all the Web documents that contain those words. But with the advent of multimedia Web objects, the words those engines have been indexing are no longer available as easily parsed text - they are contained in compiled, compressed forms.
The possible result? Those advanced, state-of-the-art multimedia sites may end up losing out to the easily indexed HTML sites.
- Darrel Plant (dplant@moshplant.com) is writing a book on Shockwave.
