Introduction

With WWWeaasel, we help leverage the ubiquity of the World Wide Web (WWW) to create a multimedia-computer-based electronic engineer's notebook. Multimedia collaboration over the internet is now possible through the unifying force of widespread deployment of WWW, HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), and HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Given that WWW and HTML are sufficient for serving, delivering and storing the data in an engineer's notebook, we gain numerous advantages in leveraging this protocol/system in WWWeasel:

• The growing number of people already experienced in navigating and using existing world-wide-web browsers, search tools, etc. means that useful design techniques for creating ``good'' hypermedia will be increasingly well understood by engineers using WWWeasel to document their own personal web of information. The facility that engineers and designers have with WWW and HTML as a medium of expression will make the creation of hypermedia engineering notebook entries far less foreign than using a proprietary system.
• The ubiquity of WWW means we can easily upgrade in a standards-conforming fashion via HTTP protocol extensions and HTML browser extensions for document security, user-authentication, electronic commerce, etc. For example, with WWWeasel, we will easily be able to leverage the upcoming widespread standards-organization-approved support for S-HTTP (from EIT and Terisa Systems) to help solve problems of authenticating and access-controlling readership of given documents, providing document upload security, etc.
• Technology based on Distributed Open Systems: the current ubiquity of Web browsers (e.g. Netscape and Mosaic) enables design documents to be read by a wide variety of people in different departments, using nearly any kind of computing equipment. We have the freedom to allow customers/users to choose from a wide range of commercial and free WWW software for servers, search tools, database interfaces, etc. Customers may use a wide range of hardware platforms as well.
• Motivation: engineers and designers will be motivated to learn and use a tool like WWWeasel to document their own work, because knowledge of how to create HTML documents in WWWeasel will be directly applicable to creating one's own internet ``home page''. WWWeasel will help simplify internet publication of a wide variety of material, ranging from professional interests to hobbies and personal interests. Using and learning WWWeasel and the World Wide Web means they will be able to share their work/interests with other collaborators, friends, acquaintances, perhaps at far away locations, universities, corporations, and government agencies.