BTC640/Overview

Lecture

Textbook chapter: 1

• Ignore the term 'Hypermedia' in the textbook. This term was never adopted outside of academics.
• DHTML used to be a big fancy complicated thing back in the days but now (even before HTML5 it is irrelevant. Ignore this term also.

What is multimedia, where is it used, evolution, technologies. Presentations is not the same as powerpoints.

Technologies

• HTML (http://littlesvr.ca/)
• CSS (http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_examples.asp)
• Static images (http://littlesvr.ca/misc/lacloche/)
• Animated images (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation)
• JavaScript (any modern website)
• Traditional slideshows (MS Powerpoint, LibreOffice Impress)
• Slideshows on the web (http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/)
• Browser plugins (Java, Flash, Silverlight)
• Video (TV, files, disks, on the web)
• Audio (Radio, files, disks, on the web)
• VRML
• Traditional applications (using rich text, images, sound, video)
• Kiosk type applications (e.g. Seneca Freedom Toaster)

Distribution

• Copying - little distribution opportunity.
• Readonly media - limited distribution and expensive.
• Downloads - good distribution opportunity but limited by bandwidth and hosting is not completely free.
• Live on the web - client-side bandwidth limit very important.
  • First rule: don't test locally or on a LAN, use at least a regular highspeed internet connection to test your work.
  • Second rule: see if your website is at all usable on low speeds (dialup, "Lite" services).
  • Use a tool like http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ to measure how big your pages are.

Degree students

Read the 10 page paper Multimedia Information and Learning (Najjar, 1996). We are not writing academic papers in this course but you should be familiar with what an academic paper looks like and as degree students you're supposed to be able to write one. If you choose to continue your studies after graduation you will have to read hundreds of these and write some too. Read it here because it's relevant to the course and will give you (perhaps a first) feel for this type of document.

Note that even though the paper is 15 years old the substance basically hasn't changed. While going through this course you will find that despite many updates to technologies the same principles that have been studied before the explosion of the web still stand today.

Lab

Wiki/Moodle accounts.