Resumen
Computer science has been starting at bounds of the computer, hoping for a language, a technique, a system that would transcend the rigid bounds of the purely procedural. All of those attempts have failed, to a greater or lesser degree. Two Microsoft online encyclopedias, namely, Encarta and Cinemania stand on either side of a continental divide in electronic publishing. Both make use of multimedia, clever search technology and hypertext to create a rich interface to a body of information. Cinemania can not be used to select and download a movie to be viewed, it is easy to see that it will be used in that way in the future. The interesting thing about Cinemania is that the interface it provides is not just a software interface, but an information interface, an artful arrangement of words, pictures and sounds, that the user navigates through in a process of searching, evaluation and ultimately selection. In Cinemania, the information competent is tightly bound to the software component. On the Web, the software component is an open system with a lightweight language that non-programming users can easily master