Week 3, jumping through hoops: object

Embedding Media on a webpage

the homework for this week was to research the (x)html object tag. Truth be told, I’ve never had an in-depth look into this thing, or any way to embed multimedia into an (x)html page. But as it turns out, it’s quite a horrible thing to do. Reason being that on Internet explorer browsers, the object tag is used, while on mozilla/netscape based browsers, embed is used for the same purpose. the W3C also mentioned partial support for the object tag on it’s website, and as we all know, partial browser support is always nice for a web developer to have to deal with… not.

So adobe recommends putting an embed tag inside an object tag to ensure that all browsers actually do what you’d expect them to do, which seems like a fair approach, as long as it doesnt break the xhtml standard on my sites.

So then I decided to look around on some websites myself, and see how they solved the problem, and what i found out was: they didn’t. Some use object, some use embed, but never a combination, and usually a very ugly ‘fix’ is put in place, like putting the html for the embed inside of a div src attribute, and it’s to no-ones surprise that none of these sites are actually using valid xhtml, or even html, and from what I can see, they purely rely on the browser to fix the html for them, which is really the most horrible thing you could ever do as a web designer. For now I like the youtube approach best, which I’ve pasted in a quote below. I can’t wait for html5 and xhtml2 to take over with their proper multimedia support tags, and get rid of the object soup.

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="500" height="340" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/SYxte83ISuc&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" />
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<!-- embed tag here is for cross-browser compatability -->
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="340" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SYxte83ISuc&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
</object>

Pushing the web to the edge

Another part of the assignment is to find a number of websites, or web-applications if you want to be all fancy-pants about it.

So I’ve looked around for a bit, and came up with my top 5 of boundry-pushing sites that I could come up with, any some comments on why they are.

Photoshop.com

In an attempt to keep people from pirating Adobe’s own creative suite just for simple image editing, Adobe has created an online version of photoshop which lets you do basic edits and transformations in your browser, free of charge. Utilizing flash, Photoshop’s web cousin gives the user just enough tools to prevent them from pirating, but not nearly close enough tools for the pro, or semi-pro user. A full-blown online image manipulation application pushes the boundaries of what you’d expect to do in a browser, using it as a tool, not as a viewer, any longer.

Jaycut.com

What photoshop.com does for photos, Jaycut does for home video editing.

Giving the user all the tools they could possibly need, Jaycut allows for video editing similar to Apples’ iMovie, or Microsofts’ Windows Moviemaker, but online, accessible  anywhere where there is a browser with Adobe Flash support. Video editing in the browser: very much pushing the limits of what you expect to be able to do on the internet.

Google Docs

Docs is an online replacement for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and other word processing applications. It moves creating, saving, sharing, and collaborating on documents entirely into ‘the cloud’, where you can optionally save a copy to your local computer in a number of common formats, including word document. Though not entirely in real-time, it also allows you to work on the same document with multiple people at the same time. As a response to google docs, Micosoft has started development of their own online office suite, but only offers it as a bonus feature of it’s existing software (still requiring you to pay for it).

RPX/OpenID

While technically not a useful website when used alone, OpenID and RPX allow for instant login on a large variety of other websites, without requiring the user to create yet another online account. The services uses modern web technologies like flash and ajax to work it’s magic, and supports users logging in with Windows Live ID, Yahoo, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, AOL, MySPace, Wordpress and the list goes on and on. Users can log in on any of these websites using a single account, which they most likely already have, lowering the threshold of engaging with an online community or service. OpenID is an open standard/platform, is owned by no-one, and gaining traction on the web since it’s fairly easy to add to existing websites.

In short, RPX with OpenID aims to be a single login for the internet, and is being increasingly successful in it.

Tags: embed, html, object, standards, web, xhtml

week 2, dreamweaver

second lecture, more basic info that I knew back in 2005. I had some trouble with dreamweaver, setting things up, but sorted it out within 20 minutes or so. Also set up my ftp client, and Coda (www.panic.com/coda), which I think might just become my favorite web development editor. Never had a need to use such a tool before, but it does seem to be handy right now, and loads cheaper than dreamweaver (as in, i can actually afford to buy it legally).

Ken saw my site from last week today, wanted to talk about me going through the stuff faster and reminded me about the exemptions. I guess I forgot that there was some time reserved to sort those things out for people who already have the skills. I’m thinking this would be a nice idea to free up some time and focus a bit more on the other lectures, but we’ll see just how much of CT I can skip. I don’t know javascript, but since I know C/C++, this should be fairly easy.

Check out my amazing website though! [/sarcasm] (opens in a new window/tab)

Week 1, first website

A pretty boring lecture, probably interesting to quite a large part of the class, and I’ve heard about people pulling all-nighters already over this stuff, but to me this is just way too easy.

Was supposed to make a simple website using html, but that’s ancient, so I decided to make a tableless css layout with some nice subtle colours. And I’ve been able to do the whole thing during the lecture. Got bored at some point and decided to just relax for the rest of the lecture. I like Ken as a lecturer though, he can explain stuff in a way that conveys the most important information to people to those for who this is new.

I haven’t actually seen a whole lot of people with webdesign experience just yet, and to top it off, there was this guy sitting behind me who was complaining that typing html was too much work. Obviously he had absolutely no clue what so ever what the full-blown IGAD courses are like. A&T has been pretty easy going so far.

I’m still going to the lectures though, maybe there is some useful information in the later lectures, I mean, I’m self-taught, so theres quite the possiblity that I’ve missed some handy techniques or whatnot.

Week 1, Story of my Life game

The road from gamer to industry insider

A platforming game, showing how I experienced the journey from a non-gamer, to  a gamer, and into the gaming industry. Starting off with a simple first game and an interest in technology, moving on to a meta-game, and going into the main platforming game, where the player goes to media events and collects notes in order to write an article based on them, ending up meeting the big names such as hide kojima, peter molineux, and playing their games as minigames, but also others that work at media publications, universities, and indie developers. The target audience would be gamers with an interest in getting into the industry, but still aiming for entertainment rather than a factual how-to. The player will be controlling the protagonist using the directional buttons on the psp handheld console, through the progressive, linear storyline.