Multimedia

If you want to include video, audio or other multimedia on your web pages, there are two things you'll need to learn:

• How to prepare your media for the web
• How to embed it in your web pages

Preparing audio or video is mostly just a case of compressing it so it is small enough to be sent over the Internet. High quality video takes up a lot of space on your computer and is far too large to send over the Internet; smaller files tend to be grainy, fuzzy, and small in physical size as well. So it's all about finding a compromise that works for you and your users - a file that's not so large it cannot be played properly, or so small that the quality makes it unintelligible. Any editing software will let you choose settings when you save it, so you can decide where to make the compromise.

The other types of multimedia you might want to include are Flash or Shockwave, often in the form of short animated movies, games or activities. Preparing these files is all done in the relevant applications (Macromedia Flash or Macromedia Director). Embedding multimedia is done with an HTML tag, just as with images. Instead of the <img> tag, you use the <embed> or <object> tags. If you're using Flash, it will generate the appropriate tags for you, otherwise, there are plenty of instructions on the web.