Summary of September 20 Web-Walkers meeting

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 14:23:08 -0400
From: Judy Hallman <hallman@gibbs.oit.unc.edu>
To: web-walkers@unc.edu
Subject: Summary September 20 Web-Walkers meeting 

Summary of September 20 meeting on multi-media and graphics in Web pages.
Kathy Thomas, Office of Information Technology, presenter
[Thanks to Elizabeth Evans for help with notes.]

Future meetings

We discussed possible meeting topics and came up with the following:

October 18: Software and tools for Web servers, including CGI scripts
November 15: Hot Java
December 20: Copyright; Laura Gasaway, Director of Law Library and Professor of Law, UNC-CH
January 17: Designing for the largest number of users: Elizabeth Evans, discussion leader

Questions and discussion

There was some discussion of HTML editors.

Someone asked how Kathy created the UNC-CH Home Page. She described what she did; says she gets lots of e-mail asking this question; it was suggested that she add that information to "About the UNC-CH Home Page."

Presentation

She started with http://www.unc.edu/~kdt/mm.html and showed a couple of her favorite web pages that use media; for example, Treasures of the Csars at http://www.times.st-pete.fl.us/Treasures/Default.html -- in particular http://www.times.st-pete.fl.us/treasures/TC.2.1.2.html. And she showed Travels wih Samantha (http://webtravel.org/samantha/table-of-contents.html), in which the use of photos draws the viewer to reading the text.

Word (at http://www.word.com/index.html) has some animation.

Superpaint and Photoshop on the Mac or Photoshop and PaintShop-pro on a PC can be used to produce clip art, which can then be saved as gif files and incorporated into web documents.

For graphics, .gif files are best for charts and can be used inline. There is an interlace option, which causes the full gif to be displayed quickly at low resolution and gradually filled in at higher resolution. If this option is not used, the gif develops at its highest resolution from the top down. A non interlaced sample is at http://www.unc.edu/about/provider/media/noldwell.gif and an interlaced sample at http://www.unc.edu/about/provider/media/ioldwell.gif.

Interlacing is done with software called Gifconverter on the Mac and L-view Pro or Paint-Shop Pro on the PC. This shareware is also used to convert other formats, like pict files or most any other formats to gif format.

Someone asked if interlacing affects resolution. Kathy answered that it doesn't, but she has noticed recently that the final pass to complete the image isn't always made.

jpeg files are also used for graphics. They are not supported on all browsers, but they do a better jobs than gifs for photos. You can't interlace jpegs; they are not currently supported inline on all browsers.

Transparency: Use LD Pro on a PC or Transparency on a Mac to make a color transparent. Transparency will take one color in the graphic, typically the background color, and make it transparent so that the browser's background shows through.

Although audio can be done in .wav, .aaif, and .au files, it is best to use .au files because most users have the helper app configured to play that file type.

Audio files are often big and take a lot of time to download. Macintoshes come with a microphone and recording sound is quite easy -- using Soundmachine.

Only use video when nothing else will do. Two formats are Quicktime and MPEG. The file size will vary considerably between the two. Quicktime has to be "flattened."

You can use Sparkle to create a video.

You can use clip art from CDROM.

Push/pull animation is Netscape only.

At the end of the meeting, Tom Hocking pointed out that NASA has a lot of good sites -- he links to them from the Morehead Planetarium page at http://tfnet.ils.unc.edu/~dataman/ast/ast.html.

And we briefly discussed the idea of having a video camera pointed at the old well. Jason Purdy volunteered to check into what would be required to do this. This does not appear to be a high priority item.

Attendees:

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