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.