These plugin media extensions have turned the Web into a massive distributed cross platform open standard multimedia system, with the process of development continuing. Web pages can now contain all the elements of conventional multimedia, together with mail, file transfer, news and other Internet functions not traditionally part of multimedia authoring languages. The pack you are reading is just such a CD product, with both internal links to its own pages hypertext and multimedia elements, as well as external links to other Web sites. Instead of selecting a particular multimedia vendor's proprietory format, and thus having to use their format-specific multimedia player, the resources you are reading can be viewed on any browser, on any machine, on CD or over the Web. To confuse matters, technologies are merging and overlapping.
Graphics formats are also similar.
In the section on multimedia , we described it as 'an amalgam of several technologies bringing together hyperlinked, complex media with specialised program extensions, displaying them under a recognisable metaphor' and we outlined why such systems are important to developers of materials for VI users. Clearly, those same features - nonlinearity, interactivity, and the ability to modify the user interface, also apply to Web materials. But there are distinctions. The first is the metaphor . No matter how much effort designers put into getting away from it, the underlying metaphor is that of a linked set of text pages.