Chapter List

DEFINING INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA AND THE INTERACTIVE WRITER

The first edition of this book was called Writing for Multimedia. At that time, Web sites were primarily text with a few pictures, and CD-ROMs had "true multimedia", with text, images, video, sound, animation, and sophisticated interactivity. Because of this, the word "multimedia" made many users think of CD-ROMs and later DVDs, not Web sites. But now true multimedia has come to the Web with the increased online use of the rich media and interactivity once reserved for CDs. For this reason I have greatly expanded the coverage of the Web in this edition. To make this clear I changed the book's title to Writing for Multimedia and the Web. Strictly speaking, this doesn't make much sense because the Web is just one way to present multimedia along with CDs, DVDs, and other platforms, but I included "the Web" in the title for the many readers who still think of multimedia as programs on CD and the World Wide Web as something completely different.

Maybe by the time the next edition is published the language will have caught up with usage, and I can simply title the...