Low cost hypermedia authoring with the Microsoft Windows Multimedia Viewer Publishing Toolkit

Recently, Microsoft Corp. launched Version 2 of its Multimedia Viewer Publishing Toolkit (MVPT), thereby facilitating the low-cost authoring of hypermedia systems for the Windows graphical user interface (GUI) on personal computers (PCs). Using these tools, Microsoft have produced a successful series of CD-ROM based hypermedia systems including the Encarta encyclopaedia and the Bookshelf writer´s reference. Their Cinemania product consists of one Multimedia Viewer data file (CINMANIA.MVB) containing 33,535 topics and being 139 MByte in size. The MVPT has the following advantages: it is cheap to buy at around £300, produces fast and professional results, and makes good use of the Windows GUI entirely without programming. Microsoft Windows can be criticised as a closed system tied to proprietary standards, but it nevertheless has proved itself in the marketplace. Our research has shown that it is a time-consuming but uncomplicated task to author large hypermedia documents using both the Windows Help Compiler and the MVPT