175 
These files and the photographic textures are generated by 
modelling and rendering procedures inside programs like 
3DStudio MAX 2 (the most recent upgrade is R2.5) (Peterson, 
1998). 
Their visualisation demands the availability of a browser both 
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and VRML (Virtual 
Reality Modeling Language): it is therefore necessary to add a 
plug-in to the traditional web browser. Cosmo Software, a 
company of the Silicon Graphics, produces Cosmo Player, a 
eraphical browser useful to navigate through 3D "scenes" (fig. 
1, on previous page). Its 2.1 release presents meaningful 
improvements in the phase of rendering: a base package is 
already included in the latest version of the most known 
browsers (Hoffman, 1998). 
In such a way the WWW is becoming more and more similar to 
the real world, i.e. interactive, continuous and three- 
dimensional: the second generation of the World Wide Web is 
becoming a reality. Specific tools can today support the 
creation of web sites and their management: for the 
experimentation here described the Microsoft FrontPage 
program has been used. Both releases 97 and 98 support all the 
operating phases without demanding a specific HTML 
programming knowledge. In particular, FrontPage 98 allows the 
user to take advantage of the new performances for animation 
provided by HTML release 4, the dynamic HTML (DHTML). 
So, the most expert developer can satisfy his requirements 
(Karlins, 1998). 
The necessary functions are in fact available in order to plan 
and create quickly a web site; the program (for Windows 95 or 
NT) supplies both FrontPage Explorer, to build and manage a 
web site, and FrontPage Editor, to realise and modify web 
pages in HTML language. 
Particularly, FrontPage Explorer has options to create, visualise 
and present web sites; it allows the generation and modification 
of hypertextual connections, the I/O of text and image files and 
anything else requested for a web construction. 
FrontPage Editor, instead, is the tool for WWW document 
making which offers the possibility to analyse interactively 
each page, like a word processor. All the HTML code is 
automatically provided by this procedure that also gives the 
support for an advanced programming through small applets in 
Java. Java is an interpreter language (object-oriented), proposed 
from Sun Microsystem for the creation of interactive web pages 
in Internet on whichever platform. 
FrontPage software is well integrated into the family of Office 
applications. 
3. THE HARLEQUIN WEB SITE 
The site, built during the study, is related to the historical 
settlement of Oneta, located in high Brembana valley (small 
town of S. Giovanni Bianco) not far away from the city of 
Bergamo. Its central nucleus, between history and legend, 
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