Bells and Whistles

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WWW Cutting Edge: Adobe Acrobat, CCI, CGI, HTML 3.0, Java, and VRML.

It is one more indication of the dynamism of the Internet and indirectly of our own restlessness that the Web is already at another key point of transition in its very short history. There are at least four areas where major transitions are occuring in the Web. First, as desktop publishing gravitates more and more to the Web many authors grow increasingly frustrated that their control over the text is limited by the relative limitations of HTML. HTML specifies a logical structure of relations. H1 through H6 tags control the size of displayed text, but only in a relative fashion. H5 is larger than H6 but how much larger will vary from browser to browser. At a much more dramatic level the whole format of a page -- graphics placement, fonts, background color, table recognition, etc. -- will vary from browser to browser in HTML. Programming languages like PDF from Adobe Acrobat allow precise control of text from browser to browser. Secondly, for all the power of Mosaic-like-browsers they display a static image, that must be reloaded to pass on new data. As one writer has recently lamented: "Do you find yourself staring in boredom at pictures embedded in an endless stream of homogenous text, sighing as you wait impatiently for a few movies and sounds to play?" (Kathy Tafel, "The Future of the Web HTML 3.0, and VRML" The Net November, 1995, 56-63. New developments on the Web like HotJava will allow for interactive applications. Thirdly, VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) allows you to enter a room, engage in conversation, all within a 3 dimensional environment. Fourthly, while it is possible to download video and sound files using a browser these files can be quite large and take considerable time even over a fast T1 link. It is now possible with programs like Real Audio and CuSeeMe to view these files in real time.

Obviously for us as educators the larger question is what does all this mean in terms of classroom instruction. For the moment I will leave the details of that question in abeyance and focus on some of the technical developments. There are, however, some examples of sites that illustrate the educational use of aspects of this interactivity on the following pages eg. Yahoo, Virtual Tourist, Virtual Frog Dissection.

I will continually update these page (1-11-96). This area has grown too large to maintain on a single page. I have just made a number of seperate pages with links and will try to keep pace with the changes more conscientiously detail. If one needed a measure of the increasing importance of Java and VRML the actions of Microsoft in the second week of December clarifies it. Microsoft has blinked and will license Java. Netscape had done this several months earlier and Microsoft was loosing considerable ground in the battle for the Internet. The also announced on the same day that the Microsoft Network was being revamped as an Internet provider. They have written off AOl and Prodigy as a blind alley.

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