This paper describes the design and implementation of MPRES, a Multime
dia Presentation Toolkit for the WWW. The WWW has seen phenomenal grow
th over the last couple of years. It has become a vast repository of m
ultimedia information that is accessible to virtually anyone having a
browser. MPRES is a multimedia presentation system that allows a user
to compose and render a presentation consisting of objects referenced
by their URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). It uses the concept of dyna
mic documents to render on a WWW browser, a sequence of multimedia sce
narios, having objects of types such as audio, image, plaintext, HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language) document and animation. MPRES Author, the
authoring subsystem, allows the user to interactively test and compose
such a presentation, using the Netscape Navigator to collect multimed
ia resources from the WWW. A presentation database stores the presenta
tions and provides a convenient frontend for accessing them. (C) 1997
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.