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Web Guidelines: MIT Libraries
Media - Animation, etc.
Animated GIFs
Avoid the use of animated GIFs on our public web
site. Most people find them highly distracting. If you feel you can create
an animated GIF that is subtle and and adds value to the content, run
it by the web advisory group before using it.
Video
& Sound files: MP3, Real Audio, Quicktime, etc.
Please
contact the Web Manager (hennig@mit.edu) if you are planning on working
with large media files. We may want to give you space on a local server
instead of Athena.
The information
below is from MIT's
web guidelines:
If you
choose to add video to your site, keep in mind the following points:
Always provide a link on the page to the appropriate plug-in.
Always note how big a movie is next to its link so that people
can
estimate download time.
Consider providing the movie in multiple formats and/or sizes to
accommodate different users with different bandwidth. (Special note:
The Sorensen codec used in QuickTime 3 and above is not compatible
with the Athena media players.)
Provide text equivalents for important information in video elements.
(See the W3C recommendations for instructions.)
Avoid using the <EMBED> tag to place the movie on the web
page. The
Athena-based movie players cannot play movies coded with
<EMBED>.
Consider the audience: QuickTime is viewable on every platform
at
MIT, but QuickTime VR is not. However, QuickTime VR is perfectly
appropriate for a site viewed largely by people outside of MIT (for
example, the Virtual Tour).
Shockwave & Flash
Please
contact the Web Manager (hennig@mit.edu) if you are planning on using
these formats.
The information
below is from MIT's
web guidelines :
If you
choose to add these formats to your site, keep in mind the following
points:
Shockwave
is a comparatively new streaming multimedia format, introduced by Macromedia
in 1996. Macromedia Director users can save their interactive movies
to the web in Shockwave format, which is unfortunately available only
for Macintosh and Windows. As a result, MIT web publishers should deliver
Shockwave content only if it is primarily directed at an external audience,
or if the content is essentially decorative.
Flash
is quite similar to Shockwave, in that it is also a format for delivering
streaming multimedia content. Flash files allow users to animate and
scale vector graphics to any size without loss of resolution. In addition,
the resulting files are quite small and quickly delivered over the
web.
Flash players
are available for every major platform, and are installed on Athena.
MIT web publishers using Flash should be careful not to use JavaScript
to autodetect whether the plug-in is installed, because of a bug in
the UNIX Flash players that causes them to fail autodetection.
Despite
the fact that Flash is available on all platforms at MIT, web publishers
should still consider it a method of delivering decorative or nonessential
content; like all multimedia elements, Flash is not accessible via
text-only browsers.
For more infomation, see MIT's
web guidelines.
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