Building Hypertext on a Multimedia Toolkit: An Overview of Andrew Toolkit Hypermedia Facilities

This paper discusses several hypermedia facilities built on top of the Andrew Toolkit (ATK) and their use in ATK applications. As a general-purpose, multimedia, application-development system, ATK permits many kinds of links, references and other connections to be made within pieces of content and between pieces of content, regardless of the content's medium. We argue that starting with a multimedia architecture facilitates the construction of all forms of hypermedia. Four specific hypermedia facilities implemented with ATK are discussed: an integrated web and indexing system (Help), a simple multimedia link facility (Link), a cross reference (Textref) capability, and a linksupporting embedded object language (Ness). As a toolkit, ATK is used to build other applications which inherit ATK's hypermedia facilities. Therefore we consider briefly the way that hypermedia facilities are used in conventional applications, such as mall systems.