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5.As if those are not reasons enough to stick with HTML text, consider the fact that each image must be downloaded, translated, and displayed by the browser—a process that can take more time than the reader is willing to devote to your site.
Lest you run scared, bear in mind that most web users rarely, if ever, change their browsers’ defaults. By default, images are turned on, JavaScript is turned on, and style sheets are turned on, which means that your typographic choices and other design decisions come through intact (albeit filtered by the visitor’s browser and platform). Nevertheless, educated users do have the power to filter your work through their preferences, so it is important to think of web design as a partnership with the people who read and view your sites and to accept the fact that your layouts might be transformed by visitors with special needs or quirky preferences.
Figure 2.6
An embedded QuickTime video at The Ad Store’s website. QuickTime streams the video, enabling it to begin playing before the file has fully downloaded. In this way, the needs of the low-bandwidth user are accommodated without impacting file quality (www.the-adstore.com).
MULTIMEDIA: ALL TALKING! ALL DANCING!
The Web not only presents text and images, it also can present music, movies, and unique forms of interactive animation such as interactive vector animations created in Macromedia Flash (www.flash.com) and videos delivered in the QuickTime, Real, or Windows Media Player formats. Design benefits include the power to absolutely mesmerize viewers. Design challenges include creating the work itself; optimizing the work so that it
38 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Multimedia
streams quickly to the viewer’s browser instead of taking half an hour to download; and developing alternative content for those who cannot view the multimedia file. Additional challenges include avoiding cliches and knowing when multimedia is inappropriate.
On the Web, multimedia is most often delivered through free players (such as RealPlayer) and free browser “plug-ins.” These are much like the thirdparty plug-ins that add new capabilities to programs such as Adobe Photoshop, except that they’re free. Browser plug-ins are downloadable mini-applications that handle specific types of multimedia (MIME) content. For instance, the QuickTime plug-in (www.apple.com/QuickTime/) allows Mac and Windows users to view digitized videos. It also plays MP3 audio files, Windows WAV audio files, Windows AVI movies, PNG images, BMP images, and other common media formats.
When the visitor encounters a web page with an embedded QuickTime movie (www.apple.com/trailers/), she can watch the movie with a click of the mouse. If she hasn’t installed the plug-in yet, she can download it and then watch the movie. The QuickTime plug-in comes standard in both Netscape and Explorer’s browsers, so the issue is moot for most web users, who usually use one or both of these browsers. Flash and RealPlayer also come standard with Netscape’s browsers.
The Server Knows
The quality of the movie may vary depending on the visitor’s access speed. With QuickTime 4 and higher, for instance, the faster the connection, the larger the movie and the higher its quality. This is accomplished through an ingenious scheme whereby QuickTime content is exported (saved) at a variety of quality levels and stored as a series of related files on the web server. When the visitor’s browser requests the file, the server checks to determine the visitor’s connection speed and responds with the appropriately optimized file.
How does the server “know” the user’s connection speed? The plug-in
“tells” the server. QuickTime includes a control panel, which asks the user to select her connection speed. This information is then conveyed to the plug-in. Ingenious.
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The server actually knows quite a lot about each site visitor’s setup. For instance, it knows what kind of browser is requesting each file on a given web page, which version of that browser (5.0, 5.5, and so on) is being used, and which operating system runs on the visitor’s desktop. The ability to access this information can be quite useful when you’re coping with browser and platform incompatibilities—as we’ll discuss in Chapter 11, “The Joy of JavaScript.”
Because the server finds out and records this information every time a web page file is requested, you also can find it out for yourself by checking your site’s referrer logs. What are those? Glad you asked.
Referrer logs are a standard means of letting the site’s builders or owners know how many people are visiting, what browser and platform they’re using, and which third-party sites “referred” these visitors via links. They also track the national origin of each unique visitor, tell you which pages are the most visited, and much more. Referrer logs are cool.
You won’t find your visitors’ names, addresses, and telephone numbers, of course. That information is private, not because all site owners are decent human beings but because such information is unknowable unless the visitor has voluntarily supplied it.
On certain news sites (www.nytimes.com) and some database-driven sites, the visitor must enter this private data before accessing content. The data is then stored on a cookie on the visitor’s hard drive, allowing the user to return to the site without having to undergo the tedious log-in process each time. Advertisers and site owners foam at the mouth over the possibility of procuring information like this. We’ve even had a client ask if there was any way to find out each user’s business phone number “without telling them.” (Answer: No, and if there were, we wouldn’t tell you.)
Web users’ privacy concerns make them unlikely to provide personal data without sufficient motivation. Reading The New York Times free of charge may constitute sufficient motivation. Finding out more about Widgets.com probably does not.
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Many sites over the years have unwittingly erected barriers by forcing users to enter personal data without first giving a clear picture of what the user would gain by doing so. Many of these were sites flung together like so much moldy cheese by traditional media moguls. When users failed to register, the moguls would claim that “Web content doesn’t work” (if the illconceived site was their own) or trumpet the failure far and wide (if the site belonged to a competitor). Some of these sites offered decent content, but few folks were willing to cross the privacy barrier to find out about it.
Though web users are understandably reluctant to reveal their salaries and sexual preferences merely to view content, the server’s tracking of less sensitive information can still be incredibly useful to the design and development team. For instance, if you discover that a great many visitors are coming from Sweden, you might commission a Swedish translation of the site—thereby enticing still more Swedes to visit. If you learn that 90% of your audience is using a 5.0 browser or better, you can incorporate standards-based dynamic technologies with less fear of alienating your core user base. The combination of server user awareness and sophisticated plug-ins such as QuickTime allows you to craft the optimum experience for each visitor.
The server can always tell each user’s connection speed, operating system, and browser. This allows sophisticated plug-ins like QuickTime to deliver the optimum experience for each user. As we’ll see later, it also enables us to do clever and useful things with JavaScript.
Not every player or plug-in format accommodates user connection speed in precisely the same way that QuickTime does. A Flash movie, for instance, does not vary depending on the user’s connection speed; it is always the same Flash movie. Flash, however, was designed specifically to couple rich multimedia experiences with compact file sizes. Why is this important?