Finegrained Synchronisation in Dynamic Documents

Dynamic documents not only contain ‘dynamic’ contents like videos, audios, or animation, but more generally, changes over time during their presentation as well as temporal dependencies among components play a crucial role for them. Lectures and exams in computer-based education, entertainment (games), and even simulation are considered as target application areas. Authors of those documents (or applications, respectively) must be able to describe such temporal relationships. Therefore, an event-based model is presented, which not only allows one to specify synchronisational aspects in a flexible way, but also supports the development of distributed applications, where adjustments for delays caused by hardware and/or software can be considered automatically. In addition, various kinds of user interaction with a document’s presentation are also supported. A prototype, which is based on DECpresent (DEC 1990), is currently under implementation at Seibersdorf.