Electronic publication on the World-Wide Web: the process and the pitfalls

Abstract

The explosion of interest in the Internet in general and the World-Wide Web (WWW) in particular has focussed business attention on electronic publishing. In the frenzied rush to jump on our Web surfboards, let us not forget that communication was the reason for creation of the Internet, and effective communication requires the right tools, thoughtful planning, verbal and graphic skills, audience awareness, and a certain degree of business acumen. There are 3 major aspects of creating multimedia hypertext pages for the WWW: (1) the process of creating an electronic document; (2) the syntax of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that links the text images, and sound; (3) the communication and business issues involved in Web publishing. The paper deals primarily with the first and third aspects. HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that is used to create Web pages. The command set is small, the syntax is simple and consistent, and the documents that you can build with it offer a good degree of flexibility in content and presentation. HTML syntax is exhaustively covered in a variety of books on the topic. However, these books tend to gloss over the physical process of creating and publishing a document on the Web-particularly when it comes to hardware and software requirements for creating pictures and multimedia. They also tend to understate the business risks involved in world wide dissemination of information.