Hour 19. Embedding Multimedia in Web PagesMultimedia is a popular buzzword for sound, motion video, and interactive animation. This hour shows you how to include multimedia in your web pages. The first thing you should be aware of is that Internet multimedia is still an evolving technology. Computer multimedia in general is actually relatively new, but Internet multimedia is even newer, and is therefore in a more noticeable state of change. The rapid pace of growth for Internet multimedia creates three obstacles for anyone who wants to include audiovisual material in a web page:
The moral of the story: Whatever you do today to implement a multimedia web site, be prepared for inevitable changes as multimedia file formats and technologies continue to evolve. The good news is that you can sidestep these obstacles to some extent today, and they are all likely to become even easier to overcome in the near future. This hour first shows you how to put multimedia on your web pages for maximum compatibility with all web browsers, both new and old. It also introduces you to the standard XHTML approach to placing multimedia on web pages, which provides a clear roadmap to the future of multimedia on the web. Try It Yourself Before you see how to place multimedia on your web pages in any way, you need to have some multimedia content to start with. Creating multimedia of any kind can be a challenging and complicated task. If you're planning to create your own content from scratch, you'll need far more than this book to become the next crackerjack multimedia developer. After you have some content, however, this hour will show you how to place your new creations into your web pages. For those of us who are artistically challenged, several alternative ways to obtain useful multimedia assets are available. Aside from the obvious (such as hiring an artist), here are a few suggestions:
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