Method for delivering separate design and content in a multimedia publishing system

Description Submit all comments and votes

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to multimedia publishing systems and more particularly, to a system and method for publishing and viewing titles which include separate content and layouts.

2. Description of the Related Technology

Microsoft Network, Internet, Compuserve, Prodigy, and America On-line are examples of on-line networks. End users typically access these networks using a microcomputer equipped with a modem. During an on-line session, a user can use a variety of information-related services and communications services, including news services, weather services, bulletin board services, E-mail, and the like.

While on-line services are becoming increasingly popular, today's on-line applications are still in their infancy. In fact, significant problems continue to block independent content providers or publishers from deploying the type of sophisticated and compelling services that are necessary to provide a sustainable on-line business. At the same time, providers of existing on-line services are working to find the right technical business model and usability solutions that will promote acceptance beyond just an early-adopter audience.

In any large city, it is impossible for a single individual to keep up with the activities and events unfolding in the community. Consequently, people turn to writers, reporters, editors, critics, and others, for help in understanding and structuring the information available. In a related trend, broadcast media are increasingly unable to satisfy the needs of a diverse populace. Consequently, in most markets, narrowcast media (media that have tailored and distributed their content to smaller, well defined audiences) have become increasingly popular and profitable. In the on-line community this trend will be correspondingly more important.

One problem content providers encounter when creating applications for the mass market is the diverse audience. For example, some customers will be interested in games, some in, business, some in computer technology, and some in movies. What information should content providers deliver to keep their customers satisfied? What is needed is a system that enables a content provider to create applications that blend the content provider's editorial voice with individual customization. For example, from within a particular application, a customer could indicate an interest in the is computer business and/or classical music, and be able to acquire additional information focused on these areas. Similarly, an on-line publication might automatically synthesize and prioritize content based on different consumer preferences.

There are several significant hurdles facing the on-line industry. These problems include:

Quality. Today's on-line offerings lack the sophistication required to attract and maintain a loyal customer following. Today, the technology simply does not exist to create truly compelling applications and services with rich, interactive multimedia features, while at the same time delivering these applications and services over low-bandwidth connections. What is needed is a system that overcomes these limitations, removing existing design constraints and allowing content providers to easily deploy and maintain a new generation of on-line multimedia applications.

Control. Existing on-line services do not provide content providers complete control over the creation of their on-line applications and services. For example, application creation, distribution, customer relationships, advertising and pricing are most often controlled not by the content provider, but rather by the on-line service itself. In addition, no existing on-line service or the Internet's World-Wide-Web allow content providers to create unique, compelling and highly branded applications. What is needed is a system that enables content providers to create and develop their own unique brands, customer and advertiser relations, and business models. Content providers could then make their branded products the focus of customer interactions to the point that customers often may not be aware they are using an on-line service.

Cost. Providers of on-line services are finding that the tools to effectively manage the process of creating, deploying, and maintaining on-line applications and services are limited. Because existing tools do not fully meet the new demands of the on-line world, the ongoing cost of maintaining on-line applications can be prohibitive. What is needed is a system that is specifically designed to support existing business processes and industry standard information interchange formats. Content providers could then create on-line multimedia titles rapidly and with little production overhead.

Additional concerns for an on-line service include flexibility, automatic delivery of applications to the customer, integrating on-line information browsing with agent-based information gathering, customized content, customer receiving-device independence, support for standards, inclusion of advertising, and a familiar production process.

As more content providers move from the realm of print publishing into the on-line world, they are increasingly alarmed by the real constraints placed upon their ability to create an on-line title that is as visually rich and polished as they were able to create on paper. Further, they would like to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of today's personal computers to enhance their titles well beyond their paper versions. Specific roadblocks they encounter are:

.box-solid. In the real world, content authors are rarely skilled graphic designers (and vice versa), yet existing multimedia authoring tools require the same person to do both jobs. At the very least, the same tool is generally used for both jobs, creating an opportunity for errors to be introduced.

.box-solid. Each authored piece of content must go through the layout process before it is published, a time and human-labor-intensive process that constrains a publisher's ability to provide "real-time" information that is also visually compelling. Also, depending on exactly where a new piece of content is to appear in a publication, other parts of the publication that were previously downloaded may no longer be valid and may need to be re-composed and the new version downloaded.

.box-solid. Graphics and multimedia objects are huge, and take long periods of time to download to the average customer's or consumer's personal computer across a typical modem. Traditional approaches to visually rich on-line publishing require rendering the screen images on the publisher's machine or on the on-line service's mainframe, which then results in the download of fully-rendered graphics, the worst-case scenario for download time. In this context, rendering refers to the creation of a bitmap of a display screen in memory prior to displaying the screen. In addition, while many titles contain repeated text and/or pictures, traditional on-line publishing methods require downloading the text or image again each time it appears in a new screen.

.box-solid. The personal computers that consumers are buying today contain sophisticated processors which can do a remarkably good job of rendering rich, visually compelling titles. However, the current approaches to building, delivering and viewing rich, multimedia titles do not utilize the rendering capability of the consumer's machine.

Content providers would like to support different form factors for displaying the same content--for example, a personal digital assistant (PDA) or a 1024.times.768 pixel screen. Rich, visually compelling titles would have completely different layouts for display on these two different systems.

Content providers might also wish to create both "full" and "lite" versions of their titles, where the "lite" version contains less content for a smaller price.

Additionally, accessibility concerns might require that a content provider create a "large print" title with a completely different layout, or a title with larger controls for persons with less fine motor control of their hands.

Traditionally, supporting different form factors, "lite" versions, and "large print" titles has required creating a separate copy of the content for each title. Doing so adds additional storage overhead to the system, as well as requiring more work to keep the copies identical when updates occur.

Many different systems exist for publishing documents on a computer system. These systems are used to, for example, create newsletters or brochures to promote a particular company. In addition, publications can be used to disseminate information to a variety of customers. A number of programs exist for allowing a user to design complicated layouts for a particular application. Well-known programs such as Microsoft Publisher.RTM., Ventura Publisher.RTM., PageMaker.RTM., and PrintShop.RTM. help a user to produce attractive newsletters and brochures.

These publication systems let the user define particular regions of every page for a specific purpose. For example, the user can place a graphic frame that runs along the top of the page to hold a particular image. Such an image may include the title of the newsletter or another related aspect of the newsletter. In a similar way, the user may define other areas of the first page to include one or more text frames for holding text-based information such as the words from particular story. The user designs the text frame to have certain properties, such as height, width, background color, foreground color and other such properties so that the text becomes attractively formatted for the customer. In addition, the user can format the text information within the text frame to have desired font and paragraph characteristics. For example, the user can highlight the characters within the text frame and define that font to be, for example, bold-faced. The user can also choose to only apply a character format to specific words or paragraphs within a text frame.

After defining an initial text frame in these publishing systems, the user can define additional text frames on the same page. For example, one text frame may hold the title of a story whereas the next text frame holds the name of the author and the text of the story. Although this layout is straightforward to prepare, it is also very difficult to modify once it has been produced.

Another category of publication systems include software for electronically publishing stories across on-line networks such as CompuServe, America On-Line, or the Internet. Most of these systems create and display stories that are formatted in a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Both the HTML and SGML are standards for tagging text in documents to be displayed in an on-line network. Documents that are formatted in HTML or SGML can be viewed by several widely distributed browsers such as Mosaic and NetScape for the Internet. These browser programs read SGML and HTML tagged documents and display them with proper formatting. However, the formatting information is stored with the browser and is not distributed by the publisher.

Several programs exist for producing documents that are tagged in either the SGML and HTML format. Programs such as Interleaf's WorldView 2 allow a user to create an SGML document with, for instance, bold-face text and hyperlinks to other documents. Once a document has been saved in an SGML format, it can be read by either the Mosaic or NetScape browser. Unfortunately, all of the formatting commands for text or graphics in an SGML or HTML document are embedded, within the document. The Mosaic or NetScape browsers do not reformat these tagged documents, but rather only display the commands embedded in the SGML or HTML documents to a user. For this reason, the designers that produce the SGML and HTML documents must add formatting commands to every new document. In addition, there is little flexibility to change the document's formatting once the tagged document has been produced. Therefore, the process of creating documents for display using SGML or HTML is very inefficient for the document designer.

Other commercially available software programs for producing on-line publications are available in the marketplace. One type of electronic publisher that generates its own specific format of text while retaining the specific layout of the document is the Adobe Acrobat.TM. software package. Acrobat.TM. reads and stores documents in a specialized format known as the Portable Document Format, (PDF) for use on the Internet. Other electronic publishing programs are produced by Interleaf, Inc. (Waltham, Mass.), Farallon Computing (Alameda, Calif.) and Common Ground Software (Belmont, Calif.).

Another on-line information system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,632 by Filepp et al. This patent discusses an interactive computer system network which enables a user to display news information and perform transactional services through a personal computer. However, in the Filepp system, the news information is integrated into display regions.

The invention described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,632 includes procedures for formulating objects that have been specially structured to include display data, control data and program instructions. Unfortunately, this system does not provide a separation of the content being displayed from the design. Therefore, the same design layout cannot be shared among disparate pieces of content.

The content displayed in this system is therefore difficult to modify because new design layouts must be transmitted to the users across slow communications lines for every piece of information viewed on the computer monitor. If the content of the information was separated from the design layout at publication time, then design layout objects could reside locally on the user's computer and be available whenever required by a specific piece of content. These disadvantages are overcome by the present invention.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

This invention is a multimedia publishing system designed for creating publications that incl