Embedded document buttons are a major feature of the popular HyperCard application and are available in Microsoft Windows applications that support object linking and embedding. This paper describes and evaluates a prototype system for generalized button embedding written in the Cedar programming environment, which runs on top of the SunOS UNIX-compatible operating system. Although such a system is not well motivated with respect to human-computer interaction, the system design and the evaluation of a prototype implementation are clearly presented.

Readers would have a lot of work to do if they wanted to construct their own versions of the system from the information presented in the paper. The author claims that additional development is planned within Xerox PARC. Therefore, the intended audience is probably researchers who want to keep abreast of what others are doing in this area. The value of this particular approach to embedding buttons in regular documents (as opposed to strictly within HyperCard cards, for example) is in their dynamic nature. Buttons can be edited at any time using tools available within the host application for the document type, although the host application must implement five additional steps that are callable from the EmbeddedButtons kernel. The main benefits outlined in the evaluation seem to be that users can create and constantly adapt their own customized control panels for the host application.