The research project MAVA (Multimedia Document Versatile Architecture) focuses on simplification of specification and dissemination of multimedia documents. The problems discussed and solved by the MAVA approach are observed by using existing authoring systems. Application specific multimedia systems provide fixed concepts for only one application area. Generic systems allow the specification of documents of arbitrary application areas. This leads to complex specifications and the requirement of programming skills for authors. Goal of the MAVA approach is to simplify authoring of multimedia documents in different application areas by an extensible specification language. This allows to add new language elements for particular application areas to simplify authoring. While the extension with new media types is addressed by several approaches the MAVA approach considers also the extension for new particular application areas. Document dissemination plays also an important role. For the presentation of a document basing on arbitrary language extensions also the presentation system itself has to be dynamically extended over the Internet.