World Wide Web frontiers for seismic design and education

The ever-increasing popularity of the Internet and its promise for the so-called "Information Super-Highway" has created a great opportunity for communication of ideas in the form of text, graphics and other media. The World Wide Web (WWW) component of the Internet is becoming a vast sea of information and communication, as well as marketing and commerce. The volume of business conducted on the Internet exceeded $518 million in 1996 and is expected to surpass $6 billion by the year 2,000. Obviously such a huge information and communication resource can not be ignored by the seismic design community. This paper is an attempt to present a review of existing and potential functions of this new medium for structural and earthquake engineering applications.