Some of the most exciting pages on the Web use multimedia elements, such as sound, movies
or animation to great effect. If you have
multimedia elements which you wish to display on the
Web, you can add them to your page in Freeway in
the same way as adding text or graphics, by
creating boxes on the page to hold them.
Such multimedia content could be created by a wide variety of different programs - some
are listed below - but all are related by the fact that
to display them correctly, the Web browser
requires additional software. The additional software
is usually available in Plug-In format, and simply consists of a file which has to be dropped into
the Plug-Ins folder in the browser's application
folder, and is loaded the next time the browser is launched.
Because of this, we refer to multimedia content
in Freeway as Plug-In content.
NOTE - In version 1.0 of Freeway, Plug-In
content cannot be previewed in place on the page,
but must be previewed in a Web browser with the appropriate plug in installed.
When playing back certain kinds of content,
such as QuickTime, you can specify additional parameters to control how it displays. See
below for more information on this.
If you use plug-in content on your Web page, it
is generally a good idea to let the visitor know
what they are going to encounter on the page
BEFORE it occurs, so that they can decide in advance
if they wish to view it. Often, such content comes
in quite large files, which can be frustrating to
view over a slow connection.
Many types of content also require far more RAM than the browser normally needs in order to
play back correctly, and some people find that for
no apparent reason, certain types of content
create instability on their system.
It is essential that if you use plug-in content,
you inform the visitor what software they require
in order to view it, and provide links to
somewhere they can obtain that software (such as the
relevant manufacturer's site). Unless you do this, you
risk causing the visitor extreme annoyance and frustration, which they are liable to let you
know about in no uncertain terms!
It is nice, though not essential, to offer an alternative version of the page, perhaps in
graphic format, for people who either lack the plug-in
or the required system resources, or great enough connection speed to view the plug-in
content correctly.
QuickTime
QuickTime is the most common way of creating movie content for multimedia and the
Web. Applications like Adobe Premiere are used to digitize video and edit it, then save it in
the QuickTime format. QuickTime is also sometimes used for exporting animations created in
3D modelling programs. Both the major browsers come with default plug-ins for
displaying QuickTime, but also require that the
QuickTime system software is installed on the host computer.
QuickTime movies may comprise both sound and pictures, or just sound, or just pictures, and
are normally identified by having ".QT" at the end
of the filename.
The other movie format encountered less often
is Windows AVI.
Shockwave
Shockwave is perhaps the most common way of displaying animation on the Web, and comes
in two forms, Director and Flash. Shockwave is a proprietary standard developed and maintained
by Macromedia, and you can create Shockwave elements using either their Director, Flash
or FreeHand products. To display Shockwave, visitors must download the appropriate
plug-in from the Macromedia Web site (www.macromedia.com). There are two
plug-ins, one for Director Shockwave only, and one
which handles both Director and Flash Shockwave.
Flash is new technology, formerly named
FutureSplash before it was acquired by Macromedia, and
uses vector technology to create streamed, compact animations which run fast and download
quickly. Director is one of the industry leading
multimedia authoring environments, and is used to
create many of the presentations found on CD-ROM titles. It has been around for longer than
Flash, and uses raster information rather than vector.
This means that animations in Director tend to be
much larger than Flash animations, and may take a
good bit longer to download.
Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is a format used for creating and transferring electronic documents, and is
probably the most widely known and accepted of
such formats. Electronic documents are created as
PDF (Portable Document Format) files using special software from Adobe, and can be transferred
via the Web for viewing and printing locally. To
view or print a PDF file, you require the Acrobat Reader software, which is freely available
from Adobe's Web site, as well as being
distributed with CD-ROMs and software products. PDF
files are not typical Plug-In content, as they are
not suitable for importing into boxes in Freeway pages, but can be linked to from a Freeway
page. If the visitor has Acrobat Reader 3.0 installed
and configured correctly, the PDF can be
downloaded and viewed directly within their browser window
- the Reader temporarily adds the Acrobat navigation controls to the browser display,
and PDF documents can incorporate hypertext links
so as to allow the visitor to continue browsing elsewhere rather than forcing them to retrace
their steps.
In addition, if the PDF was created with
Acrobat 3.0, it may be set to be streamed so that the
visitor doesn't have to wait for the whole file to
finish downloading before they begin to view it.
See the section on Hypertext links to find out
how to link to external files such as PDF.
Java Applets
Java is a programming language which is
platform independent. This means the same program file
(or "Java Applet") will run on any computer
or browser which has Java capability - this now includes many MacOS compatible, Windows
and UNIX computers, although some additional software is often required to run Applets with
a Web browser, and only a few browsers support Java currently.
It is worth noting that to execute Java Applets requires a great deal of system resource on
the visitor's machine, and some browsers ship with the Java support disabled by default. If the
Applet fails to run for any reason, the visitor may just
be left looking at a blank grey box on their
screen with no explanation of what has gone wrong.
Some system administrators prevent their users running Java applets for security reasons,
or configure their Firewalls to forbid Java
applets running on a user's machine to access
anything outside. Either of these may prevent the
successful execution of your Java Applet
To import a Multimedia element into Freeway, draw a rectangular box using either the HTML
or GIF box drawing tool, then while it is selected choose Import from the File menu.
Freeway does not know in advance which of the myriad types of multimedia files you may need
to import, and so displays all available files in
the dialog regardless of whether it recognizes
their type, even applications.
Select the file you wish to import and click OK.
If the file you select cannot be identified as a graphic, it will be imported as Plug-in content.
In the box in Freeway you will see the plug-in icon, and a description of the location of the
file. When you Publish the site, the file you
specified will be copied into the Publish folder.
If the file you imported can be identified as a
Java Applet, you will see the Applet icon and a description of the location of the file. Most
Java Applets come in the form of several files, all
of which are required. Only the selected file will
be copied to the Publish folder, so you must be
sure to copy the others by hand as well.
Because Freeway cannot display the file in situ,
it is difficult to know what size to make the box
in order to display the content fully. With
Director Shockwave and QuickTime files, for example,
if the box is smaller than the element, it will play
in the browser clipped to the size of the box. For
best results, you need to know the dimensions of
the area the content occupies in pixels, and use
these values to size the box accurately in Freeway
using the Inspector Palette.
Using custom Parameters for Plug-in content
Certain formats allow the way the content plays back to be customized using extra
commands, called parameters. You can add these using
the Extended option on the file menu.
Parameters are specified as Name/Value pairs.
The parameters available depend on the format concerned.
For information about controls available for Quicktime, see the resource page at Apple's Web site:
http://www.quicktime.apple.com/dev/devweb.html
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