Authoring multimedia documents is a difficult task, which requires combining art and design skills in arranging multimedia elements with the ability of a seasoned programmer to describe complex interactions. Existing authoring tools address either of these problems in isolation but fail to address them in an integated manner.
We believe that visual programming languages (VPL) constitute a useful foundation to develop interactive documents. This paper presents our work on MIDAS, a high level 3D VPL for describing active multimedia documents. MIDAS encodes document structure and activity using a compact tri-dimensional visual representation. It uses dynamically temporised Petri nets to describe the dynamic behaviour while maintaining a simple and intuitive representation. This approach integrates both control and dataflow in an unified manner, which, together with MIDAS visual nature, provides a simple means for visualising, editing and understandng multimedia applications.
We discuss the rationale for the design of this new language, provide an overview of MIDAS and describe its salient features through simple examples.