Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Meme media technology [1] has been developed for provoking and supporting
the evolution of knowledge on computers and the Internet. It provides those
media objects which work as 'memes' coined by Dawkins [2]. It allows users to
re-edit and redistribute different knowledge resources wrapped by media objects.
Users can combine media objects through direct manipulation of them such as
'drag' or 'paste' to compose new composite media objects without any program-
ming. One user uploads a new media object on the computer network. Then,
another user can download and reuse it. Furthermore, another user can combine
the object with other objects to compose a new composite object and publish
it on the network. Through this cyclic process of users' interactions with meme
media objects, wide variety of media objects are accumulated on the network,
and the evolution of media objects is emulated.
With the development of World Wide Web, the Web has elemental function-
alities for realizing the knowledge evolution based on meme media. Thinking of
an HTML document as such a media object, it is possible for people to create a
document (as a new media object), to publish it on a Web server. Another can
browse it with a Web browser. In addition, regarding reediting and republishing
media objects, people can use copy-and-paste operation to reuse some contents
of existing Web documents. In this sense, the Web realizes a part of functionali-
ties that meme media try to provide, but for the interactive Web application or
tools, it is still dicult for the general public. People cannot extract parts of a
Web application with direct manipulation of them and reuse them in other Web
applications. To do this, people still need to do some programming with some
expert knowledge.
The latest meme media platform, called Webble World
1
[3-5], was imple-
mented with the aim of seamless integration of meme media technology into
the modern Web technologies. However, because it works on a browser plugin,
Microsoft Silverlight, the Webble World is slightly getting detached from other
modern Web-related technologies. Silverlight provides a powerful framework and
an execution environment for client-side rich Internet applications, but, unfortu-
nately, it is not supported on many mobile devises which are recently one of the
main targets in various application domains. Furthermore, because those plugins
are not the first class citizen on the Web, casual Web users and Web developers
tend to divert their attention away form the Webble World. To make the meme
media technology available to casual users on multiple devises, it is necessary to
implement a meme media platform based only with standard Web technologies,
that is, with HTML and JavaScript. Now it has become possible.
In this paper, we explore the possibility of developing a meme media platform
with pure Web technologies for more seamless integration with the Web and for
availabilities on more different types of devices. We focuses on the implementa-
tion of the client-side media object functionalities such as basic media object ar-
chitecture and combine operation of media objects. In recent JavaScript develop-
ment, there exist some problems like the compatibility among different browsers
and over flexibility. To avoid those problems we pick up a base framework for
