Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer- P19 pdf

RealPlayer www.real.com This popular plug-in/player delivers streaming video and audio, along with support for Flash and the SMIL standard.. RealPlayer is the most popular streaming vide

How to answer the clamor for sound and video and other fancy stuff? The engineers at Netscape were inventing what a web browser was supposed

to be as they went along Eventually they hit upon the notion of plug-ins

If it worked for Quark and Photoshop, it ought to work for them too

At the time, the Web was hotter than Jennifer Lopez’s Academy Awards dress, and Netscape’s browser was the thing that was making it hot Here was a marketing opportunity! Dozens of plug-ins soon flung themselves into the market When new browsers began muscling in on Netscape’s turf, they followed Netscape’s lead and supported “Netscape plug-ins” simply to compete

And here we are, more than half a decade on and still plugging away (There

is still no good Chinese food in the American Midwest, however.)

Any web designer has much to say about plug-ins, not all of it printable, and we are no exception Truth is, we could write a whole book about

plug-ins Come to think of it, we could write a book about just one plug-in In fact, many people have Hillman Curtis, for instance, wrote Flash Web Design: The Art of Motion Graphics, New Riders: 2000 ( http://www.newrid-ers.com/books/title.cfm?isbn=0735708967)

Want in-depth help with Flash, and penetrating insights into its nature?

Try Hillman’s book or Joshua Davis’s upcoming Flash to the Core (New

Rid-ers: 2001) We have our hands full as it is Meantime, let’s assess a few well-known plug-ins

Plug-ins Most Likely to Succeed

There are as many plug-ins as there are stars in the heavens Plug-ins for specialty uses, plug-ins for novelty uses, plug-ins that support the needs of mathematical and scientific markup, plug-ins that let you print official U.S

postage from your web browser No, we’re not kidding Pour yourself a strong beverage and hit http://home.netscape.com/plugins/to take in the range of available plug-ins Do you have to learn about all these plug-ins?

No

When designing content that requires plug-ins, the first question to ask is, which plug-ins? Which are most widely available? Which are likely to be sitting in your visitor’s browser plug-in folder, just waiting for you to give them something to play?

Unfortunately, this question is easier to ask than answer An assessment of which plug-ins come preloaded in which browsers does little to clarify the state of plug-in-hood As mentioned in Chapter 2, both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator include the Apple QuickTime

plug-in plug-in their distributions That much is known

Netscape also includes the RealPlayer and Shockwave/Flash IE for dows, the most popular browser/platform combination, includes the Win-dows Media Player but not RealPlayer Most WinWin-dows distributions of Explorer include Flash (but not Shockwave); Mac Explorer distributions include neither By the time you read this, all of this might have changed That’s marketing, kids

Seeing that you’re no better off than you were before, we’ve gone ahead and created a short list of plug-ins we think you’ll run into during your long and splendid web design career Herewith, please review our never-impartial assessment of the major multimedia plug-ins

RealPlayer (www.real.com) This popular plug-in/player delivers streaming video and audio, along with support for Flash and the SMIL standard RealPlayer is the most popular streaming video format because it uses the least bandwidth and works on all computing platforms (though it’s sometimes flaky on Macs)

As explained in Chapter 2, streaming video is video that plays while

down-loading Early plug-in technologies did not stream The viewer had to wait for an entire movie or sound file to download before she could see or hear the file in her browser Real was the first to offer streaming playback

Dull technical note

Even when a player supports streaming, a small amount of data must be downloaded and cached before streaming begins to ensure smooth play-back If the file were to begin playing immediately, playback could be inter-rupted later on—for instance, when other network traffic momentarily

interfered with the stream By preloading (downloading and caching) ini-tial data, the player attempts to offer smooth, uninterrupted playback

Apple QuickTime and Windows Media Player, discussed in the following section, are also streaming formats

Tool tips

The free Real Producer software available at Real’s site is of sufficient qual-ity for converting existing digital video to the Real format An inexpensive

“Pro” version provides more options, enables you to create MP3 files, and

will help you create HTML files and stub files Stub files are miniature text

files that trigger the streaming of Real files over conventional http net-works You also can easily create stub files yourself:

If lopez_dress.rm is a Real-encoded file featuring Jennifer Lopez in her famous Academy Awards dress, and if that file resides at http://www

example.com/real/lopez_dress.rm, to force the file to stream over a con-ventional web server, you need to create a stub file Open a blank text doc-ument (Write, SimpleText, BBEdit, Tex-Edit, any basic text editor will do)

In this blank document, type the address of the Real file:

http://www.example.com/real/lopez_dress.rm

Close the document and save it as lopez_dress.ram That’s your stub file, Bubba Upload it to your web server—for the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume you’ve uploaded it to the same directory as the HTML file that references it—and then conjure it up with a link like this:

<a href=”lopez_dress.ram”>La Lopez!</a>

Can you refer to it with an image instead? Of course It’s just a link

<a href=”lopez_dress.ram”><img src=”images/lopez_50x50.gif” height=”50” width=”50”

alt=”Actress Jennifer Lopez” title=”Watch Jennifer Lopez at the Academy Awards.

RealPlayer required.” Border=”0”></a>

You can also <EMBED>the file, thereby triggering the Real plug-in instead

of the Real console:

<embed src=” lopez_dress.ram “ autostart=”true” volume=”100” width=”2” height=”2”

controls=”hidden” pluginspage=”http://www.real.com”>

What does all that extra code mean? We’ll explain later

The point is to link to the stub file, not the actual Real-encoded file The stub file, being text, downloads almost instantly If the user’s browser is configured correctly, the stub file will launch the RealPlayer, which will then begin preloading the actual video clip Your visitors will soon see Jen-nifer Lopez…and so will Ms Lopez’s attorneys Be certain you have per-mission to publish the clip

You can skip the need for stub files if your client or host purchases dedi-cated Real servers—recommended if you plan to serve much video to many visitors For instance, on a site that constantly serves TV news feeds, cable comedy clips, or streaming video trailers, investing in Real servers would

be a Real good idea

Special indications

With the highest compression ratio (and consequently, the lowest quality), Real is the fastest streaming format, making it the plug-in of choice for news sites and others where quality is less important than a hardy consti-tution and the ability to deliver like James Brown With Real, you are assured of supporting the largest number of users with the widest range of connection speeds

If video files are meant to viewed and then forgotten (like a TV experience), Real is likely what you want Conversely, if video files are meant to be stored and treasured on the end-user’s hard drive, you would probably choose QuickTime instead This is, of course, merely our opinion

QuickTime (www.apple.com/quicktime/)

A high-quality streaming video format, QuickTime also supports a wide variety of streaming audio formats including the ever-popular MP3 It also delivers QuickTime VR panoramas and animated sprites QuickTime sup-ports hyperlinks in video, and offers some support for Flash and SMIL An innovative multistreaming process serves appropriately sized material according to the end-user’s connection speed, as described in Chapter 2 Last time we checked, QuickTime was the second most popular streaming format It uses more bandwidth than RealPlayer but delivers smoother video and audio The QuickTime format is native to Apple Macintosh com-puters but thoroughly supports Windows PCs

Tool tips

Delivering video over the Web should be impossible The technology works

by means of drastic compression methods Even the best of these methods include visible artifacts To minimize these artifacts and assure a better quality image, choose subject matter that compresses well

“Talking heads” compress well Swish pans and mad action sequences do not This is because the compression works by seeking pixels that barely change from frame to frame, choosing one of these pixels as a “master”

pixel, and repeating it from frame to frame in hopes of fooling your eye

The more jerky camera movement in your mise-en-scene, the more

obvi-ous the software sleight-of-hand is This is true not only for QuickTime but for all digital video

QuickTime VR panoramas can be breathtaking, and various software prod-ucts are available to help you stitch together individual photographs into

a full 3D panorama, including Apple QuickTime VR Authoring Studio (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr/authoringstudio/) You can insert sound effects in these panoramas and confine the effects to certain por-tions of the panorama See Figures 12.8, 12.9, and 12.10 for nonprofit and noncommercial QuickTime VR panoramas at Heidsite and PBS.org

Figure 12.8

Writer Jim Heid’s personal QuickTime VR panoramas convey the rustic beauty

of his community ( http:// www.heidsite.com ).

Figure 12.9

A virtual reality tour of

Khufu’s Pyramid lends

needed “gee-whiz” appeal

to an essentially

educa-tional enterprise ( http://

www.pbs.org/ ).

Figure 12.10

A hauntingly frozen

moment in time ( http://

www.heidsite.com/ ) Print

absolutely cannot do this,

nor do these screenshots

begin to convey the effect.

For instance, a 360-degree panorama of the downtown skyline might be filled with canned traffic effects until the viewer rotates the image to your company’s office tower Suddenly the sound of laughter is heard As the viewer rotates away from your office tower, the laughter is drowned by the traffic noise

Or a tranquil beach panorama could reveal the Jaws theme as the camera

reaches the sea

Or a 360-degree panorama of the client’s company softball team could reveal the hidden thoughts of each individual as the camera’s gaze passes over him or her

You get the idea QuickTime VR can be very cool

Special indications

If you want high quality, you probably want QuickTime If you want VR Panoramas, you need QuickTime Other panoramic plug-in formats are available (some of them quite good—see iPix, mentioned previously), but none are nearly as widely distributed as QuickTime Later we’ll talk about how some plug-ins managed to crawl to the top of the heap while other good ones languished It isn’t really all that fascinating a story, but gossip

is as good a reading motivation as any, and her attorneys have informed us that we can’t keep referring to Jennifer Lopez’s dress

Windows Media Player (WMP) (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/) WMP delivers streaming video and audio in the Windows Media File (WMF) format and is included in all distributions of the various Windows operating systems, making it a popular plug-in indeed Though WMP is viewed as a plug-in that primarily supports Windows users, a version is available for Macintosh folk, and it actually works well The player supports real-time capture and broadcast of audio and video files (making it com-petitive with RealPlayer) and also handles MP3 audio as smoothly as its competitors

According to Microsoft, Windows Media Player supports “near-DVD-qual-ity” video and “near-CD-qual“near-DVD-qual-ity” sound A free Windows Media Encoder makes it as easy to prepare video materials for distribution as streaming WMF files As of this writing, the free encoder runs only in Windows 98 or higher

The WMP URL we’ve listed was accurate as this book went to press, but contents might have settled during shipment (Microsoft constantly changes URLs at its site.)

Special indications

For some reason, WMF has apparently become the format of choice for the streaming distribution of “adult” content, or so our informants tell us We just thought it was kind of interesting, that’s all You try writing a chapter about plug-ins, and see if your mind doesn’t start wandering where it shouldn’t We blame Jennifer Lopez’s dress

Beatnik (http://www.beatnik.com/) Musician Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik, though less widespread than the biggest hitters, is an intriguing plug-in that comes bundled with most Netscape distributions Beatnik enhances MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) playback, easily surpassing the quality of most PC add-on sound cards and the Mac’s built-in MIDI voices It also offers strangely wonderful features, such as the ability to mix jam sessions on sites authored according to Beat-nik’s specifications

Such stuff is unlikely to be part of a site for your local church, synagogue,

or small business but might well add luster to the site for a recording artist Beatnik was used to enhance the PBS “Jazz” site (http://www.pbs.org/jazz/) that accompanied Ken Burns’s historic jazz documentary series of 2001 Beatnik works in Netscape (all platforms) and IE (Windows only) It unfor-tunately does not work in IE5/Mac because its JavaScript functionality relies on proprietary Netscape Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) Beatnik is a cool plug-in, and IE5/Mac is an extremely polished, standards-compliant web browser It seems a pity that the two cannot work together, but this raises the whole trouble with plug-ins, which we cover later in this chapter (see “The Trouble with Plug-ins”)

Shockwave/Flash (www.macromedia.com, www.macromedia.com/software/flash/) Two plug-ins now bundled as one, Shockwave and Flash, are the biggest, most-accepted, and possibly the most dynamic plug-ins on the market

They are certainly the most controversial Entire sites have been created in these formats Entire sermons have been written denouncing them

For many, Flash is a religion; for many others, it is the first sign of the anti-Christ Flash artist Peter Balogh sums up the controversy in his witty essay,

“Sympathy for the Plug-in” at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/

sympathy/

Though they share a similar blow-you-away quality and though the man-ufacturer now serves them like two peas in a pod, Shockwave and Flash are quite different

Shockwave

Shockwave is a sophisticated, proprietary format that can do anything a CD-ROM can do Full-fledged gaming environments; animated, hot-linked city maps; endless labyrinths deep within simulated subterranean worlds:

If you can dream it up, it can be rendered in Shockwave Essentially, Shock-wave files are like self-contained software programs that launch in the user’s browser

Figure 12.11

The “virtual piano” in the Jazz Lounge at PBS.org , created in Macromedia Director, rendered unto the Web in streaming Shockwave format Print cannot do this ( http:// www.pbs.org/jazz/ )

As might be obvious, the more complex and multileveled the Shockwave file, the larger it must be to do its job Thus there is a trade-off between sophisticated presentation and amount of bandwidth required

There is also the risk that Shockwave programs will exceed the user’s com-puting capacity Linux users, who take justifiable pride in cranking tremen-dous computing juice out of old, cheap PCs, frequently hit a wall when Shockwave comes to town Even Mac and PC users sometimes find Shock-wave too rich for their blood None of this is the fault of the operating sys-tems in question We’re back to the problem we discussed with Java When

it works, it’s magnificent; when it doesn’t, it ain’t

Shockwave files are created in Macromedia Director, a multimedia pro-duction and programming package requiring tremendous expertise No web designer is expected to know how to program in Director, though some specialize in it

“Hip” web agencies generally have a Shockwave master or two in their design departments—so do many “unhip” agencies (We’re not sure what

“hip” and “unhip” actually mean in the context of web design and devel-opment, but some web agencies seem to care a lot about it In this, they take their cue from ad agencies.)

Shockwave development is an art unto itself It coincides with web design but is not the same as web design Shockwave has nothing to do with the structured, semantic Web of meaning and information—but then neither does a GIF image file

Shockwave has largely escaped the fire and brimstone preached against its younger cousin, Flash, because Shockwave files are fiendishly difficult to create; therefore, gigantic Shockwave “intros” are not epidemic through-out the Web Hence the usability experts rarely scream abthrough-out Shockwave But, oh brother, do they roar about Flash

Flash

Flash is Shockwave’s lighter, less-bandwidth-intensive, easier-to-program (but somewhat less powerful) cousin Flash delivers animated graphics and sound, and it is completely interactive At this point in the history of the Web, it is easier to create rich interactive presentations in Flash than by trying to use the open standards of the Web (HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM) It’s more reliable, too, sadly enough