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Inserting Multimedia Content Plain text and graphics are all well and good, but sooner or later you're going to want to insert some multimedia content, such as a Flash movie, or an audio or video file. Unfortunately, browsers don't handle these things themselves - they use plugins, and you have to know the code to activate these plugins. While this should be simple, it isn't, for various historical reasons. To begin with, there are two ways entirely different ways of calling a plugin. Newer browsers use the object tag, like this: <object classid='clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000' codebase='http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab' width='200' height='200'> <param name='movie' value='myFlashMovie.swf'> </object> That one's for Flash. To insert things like Quicktime or Windows Media players, you just need to find out their classid and codebase URL, as well as which parameters (param tags) they require. Most browsers now support the object tag, but some still use the embed tag instead: <embed src='/support/flash/ts/documents/myFlashMovie.swf' width='200' height='200' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer'> </embed> For most cases, you should include both - it's best to place the embed tag inside the object tag, as this will cause browsers that understand object to ignore your embed. As an extra fallback, you might want to insert a 'plugin not found' message, with a link to allow users to download the plugin, but in most cases browsers should now do this for you automatically. For Internet Explorer only, you can extend object tags to call plugins that are on your server instead of on your computer - this is known as 'ActiveX'. Its most common use is to let users install web-based programs such as instant messengers without having to download and run a standalone install program. However, you have to realise that many users will see ActiveX as dodgy, because it is an often-used way of installing undesirable software, and people who aren't using Internet Explorer just won't see anything at all. If you're designing a site for a limited set of users, however (such as an intranet), ActiveX can be a very powerful capability. Tables Even though tables are rarely used for layout any more, they're still used for what they were originally intended for - actual tables of information! You'll probably need one at some point, but they're still as complicated as ever, so it's good to take a while to learn about how they work. Basically, to create a table, you have to create the rows and columns individually: each table tag contains row (tr) tags, and each tr tag contains column (td) tags. A typical table looks like this: <table> <tr> <td> month </td> <td> sales </td> </tr> <tr> <td> January </td> <td> 200 </td> </tr> <tr> <td> February </td> <td> 300 </td> </tr> </table> This can be a difficult way to work, especially if your data is organised in columns, not rows. You just need to remember that the data you put in the tds will line up depending on their order in the tr: so, for example, 'sales', '200' and '300' will line up in a column, because they are all in the second td tag of each tr. You might find it easier to use tabs instead of spaces to separate the tds, so the table appears lined up in the HTML the same way it will on the page. Once you see how that works, you pretty much understand tables - wasn't so hard, was it? The only thing left to realise is that you can make one td fill more than one column using the 'colspan' tag. In the example table, for example, you could add text that fills two columns by adding this row: <tr> <td colspan='2'>text</td> </tr>
Experiment a little, and you should be alright. Good luck.
This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portabilityThe blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail. Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:
A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail. Caching is good contingency design practiceAs I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible. A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above. And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. The perfect binder In school, binding paper project, articles and the likes, has been a necessity in order to make a good presentation to the professors. Some do it for the convenience it offers. While others to be able to preserve it in a proper order. In the corporate world, paper works, company profiles and other legal documents needed to be bound because that is the way they should be, appearance wise. Authors, of course, also need bounded books to sell to the readers. It would not be right calling it a book i… 2. New strategies for SEOs Starting somewhere between late September and November 2005, Google launched a major update to their search algorithm which shook up the search engine optimization (SEO) community and millions of website rankings. The update has been named Jagger and is apparently finished. Keywords that were used to find your site may not be producing as many visits any more because the Jagger changes caused your certain site's rankings to plummet, but many people have seen their rankings stay the same or impro… 3. Prophesying Profit in CyberSpace . . . Business owners can be rushed into creating Web sites, perhaps because 'my competition has one', or because 'it's the hot thing right now'. But, as with any aspect of your business, some preliminary thinking will help to maximize the return on your investment in this key part of your marketing mix.Here are seven key issues to consider from the outset:1. Are your markets online?Who are your customers, and are they currently using the Internet? Try a customer survey if you don't know the answer to… 4. Finger Eating Garage Door Reveals Breakthrough Web Design and Linking Strategy By Bob Volk Last Thursday afternoon I was working on a garage door and regrettably loosened the torsion spring too much. This spring is what relieves or neutralizes the weight of the garage door so the openers can work without burning out and so you don't have to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to open it.I released the door from the opener and it began closing way too quickly. As I rushed over to try and slow it’s decent, I grabbed the handle with my left hand and was trying to grab anything with my right hand.… |
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