Distributed, Interactive and Dynamic?

Distributed

Imagine that this hypertext online help system is now not just viewing the help documentation for your initial application but is also linked to the help documentation for all of your applications. Now imagine further that it is linked to an encyclopedia so you can look for more detail on some topics. Say this is now lined to library information and publication databases so you could look even further. With all of this information online you would rapidly run out of disk space or be required to insert CDROM number 2387 for example to look further.

But what if the information were freely available, didn't take up your disk space and it were available essentially anytime you wanted it and in a reasonable short period of time. This IS the World Wide Web, more information than any one person could possibly digest, distributed globally on thousands of different systems.

Interactive

It is the nature of the Web to be interactive. The act of selecting a link and following it to another document, displaying another page. On top of this simple interactivity is the ability to click in different portions of images and jump to different locations. There is also the ability to design pages which are forms (with text boxes, radio buttons, pull down menus and others) which allow the user to enter information. The Web publisher can take that information and perform some task with the data, perhaps create pages on the fly, query or add information to a database or any other conceivable operation.

Dynamic

The information in the Web is stored at the site which published it and thus the writers may update the information at any time. If you are viewing this information you do not have to update to the new version - you are always viewing the most up to date version. Publishers can easily make sure the information is up to date, there is no maintenance release or re-release to the users.

Last modified: Sun May 7 15:48:02 1995