Multimedia for the Web
| This section describes and demonstrates the various media available for web developers, providing sound and graphic experiences beyond the classical static images and hypertext. |
The web was originally a text-only medium; the H in HTML standing for "hypertext", not "hypermedia". In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina added the <IMG> tag to their Mosaic for X Windows browser - and fueled the web explosion we're still witnessing.. As well as pictures, one can also experience sound and movies. Nobody has yet invented the "scratch and sniff" monitor, but.. Two further developments are "streaming", which allows playback to begin before the files are fully downloaded; and three-dimensional presentations of sound and scenes.
The major impediment to multimedia on the web has been bandwidth - the amount of data that can be transferred to the user's browser. Until recently, most users had only a 14.4K modem, which was not really adequate for sound or video. 28.8K marks the lower end of the useful multimedia bandwidth range, and if you want to design your web site to reach these users, you will need to be cautious in your use of bandwidth. In particular, you should avoid gimmicks on your home page that may cause the user to wait more than a minute. Simply announce on your home page that you do have some really cool Java, Shockwave, VRML, or whatever, and here are the links..
| Animation | Gallery | Graphics | Java |
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| Shockwave | Sound | Video | VRML |
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Tricks & Data, Flash Yin & Yang PS Woods April 17, 2000 | Bubba, a typical client, wants you to build a Flash application that will allow him to input and display showtimes at his movie theatre. In addition, he wants to be able to update his showtimes in a .txt file that the Flash movie can read. Yin-n-Yang walks you through just such a scenario and shows you how to give Bubba precisely what he wants. |
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Digital Distribution of Music Charlie Morris March 27, 2000 | From a half-dozen two years ago, the number of places to buy music online has climbed into the thousands. Will the major record labels disappear like the dinosaurs to which they've so often been compared? Not likely. But it's now clear that independent music distributors are going to be a far bigger piece of the picture than ever before. Anyone involved in the music business, from record companies to distributors to retailers, needs to stay up on the latest trends in online music distribution. This article, which will focus on the current state of music distribution over the Web, with an emphasis on what a small record company, music retailer or artist can do to market music online. |
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0 to 60 in Flash, Part 4: Publishing PS Woods March 15, 2000 | The final installment of 0 to 60 in Flash leads you through publishing your first Flash movie for viewing in a web browser. As a bonus you'll also learn how to combine javascript functions with your movie and add sound effects to a button! |
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0 to 60 in Flash, Part 3: Today's Show: Babies Having Babies PS Woods March 8, 2000 | Now that we're getting familiar with creating in Flash, it's time to add those little extras to make our movie more advanced. In the third part of our 0 to 60 in Flash series, we'll add interactivity with actions and gain control with variables. |
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0 to 60 in Flash, Part 2: Tweening PS Woods March 1, 2000 | Last week we covered the basics of Flash including the beginning creation of our first Flash movie. This week we'll continue developing our movie and explore composing images, touching on gradients and file-size. |
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0 to 60 in Flash PS Woods February 21, 2000 | Flash is the hottest thing in web animation. This first of a four part tutorial will introduce you to creating animations with Flash. |
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Web Audio 2000 Charlie Morris January 31, 2000 | The Internet gets closer and closer to being a real multimedia experience. As the Web converges with TV and radio, sequential delivery, which means "watching" a "program" instead of "browsing" a "site," will become commonplace. Full-length features are the order of the day, and we don't even need a browser to display them, thank you very much. |
| Building My Résumé Thing Multimedia Website | A description of how The Résumé Thing was designed. A step-by-step tutorial article about a how creative non-programmer implemented Java, Javascript and MIDI music to put a multimedia résumé on the World Wide Web. Charlie describes the design goals and principles, and shows how to implement professional-looking multimedia websites with free Java, JavaScript, and MIDI sources. |
Currently there are several incompatible schemes for inserting multimedia objects into web pages. Developers have been experimenting with ideas for dealing with new media: Microsoft's DYNSRC attribute for video and audio, Netscape's EMBED tag for compound document embedding, and Sun's APP and APPLET tags for executable code. Each of these proposed solutions attacks the problem from a slightly different perspective, and on the surface are each very different. In addition, each of these proposals falls short, in one way or another, of meeting the requirements of the Web community as a whole. The W3C proposes a unifying OBJECT tag:
"..which subsumes the role of the IMG tag, and provides a general solution for dealing with new media, while providing for effective backwards compatibility with existing browsers. OBJECT allows the HTML author to specify the data, and/or properties/parameters for initializing objects to be inserted into HTML documents, as well as the code that can be used to display/manipulate that data. Here, the term object is used to describe the things that people want to place in HTML documents, but other terms for these things are: components, applets, plug-ins, media handlers, etc. "
Netscape's Multimedia Page
