Jenny Townes

Week 8 Reading Notes

1. How the material helped

I never knew the difference between .gifs and .jpgs. Thus, when I tried to add a .jpg to my webpage at first, I didn't understand why it didn't work. When I changed it to a .gif file, it worked fine.
I appreciated the section on What to do if your audience can't see your images. When we made our first webpages I wondered why the code included a description.
The section on thumbnails was useful. So were the sections on using a background image and embedding sounds. I never knew quite how to make an image into a background, and always wondered how some websites included sounds and other multimedia.
Both the Photoshop and Fireworks sites I found useful and easy to read, even though I did not have copies of the programs in front of me.

2. What I didn't understand

I didn't understand the section in the first reading on web-safe colors. Why are some colors better on some browsers than others? The color table was nice, but the site didn't say what to do if your color palette wasn't web-safe.
I also didn't understand why a .gif file is indexed and why .jpg files aren't.

3. Additional questions

• Why do browsers need plug-ins for .bmp, .tiff, etc. files?
• How do you do this: "To keep your text clear, try selecting your image and performing a low-opacity fill over it with gray or brown (to darken the image)or white (to lighten the image)"?
• What is a vector-based product and bitmap effect? (My browser wouldn't let me open the link.)