Internet and Multimedia

 
1. The combination of multimedia technology and Internet is currently attracting a considerable amount of attention from developers and potential users alike. Many new products are being announced and marketed and the information on the Web consists of “multimedia” items.
2. The Internet carries a large variety of exciting multimedia applications.
3. Internet should evolve in order to better accommodate multimedia traffic with its rigid timing constraints.

•Internet

The Internet is a global collection of computer networks that are linked together by devices called routers and use a common set of protocols for data transmission known as TCP/IP (transmission control protocol / Internet protocol). The primary purpose of the Internet is to facilitate the sharing of information.
Internet History.
The Internet began as a research network funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Defense Department,when the first node of the ARPANET was installed at the University of California at Los Angeles in September 1969. By the mid-1970s, the ARPANET “inter-network” embraced more than 30 universities, military sites, and government contractors, and its user base  expanded to include the larger computer science research community. By 1983, the network still consisted of merely several hundred computers on only a few local area networks.
 

The World Wide Web and HTML

•The World Wide Web (WWW), also called the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Burners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

•The Web, or World Wide Web (W3), is basically a system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files.
•The new Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provided rules for a simple transaction between two computers on the Internet consisting of

•    (1) establishing a connection,
•    (2) requesting that a document be sent,
•    (3) sending the document, and
•    (4) Closing the connection.

HTML

First developed by Tim Burners-Lee in 1990, HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is used to create electronic documents (called pages) that are displayed on the World Wide Web. Each page contains a series of connections to other pages called hyperlinks.
An HTML document could contain hyperlinks or anchors that referred to other similar documents. With browser software, users could then click on designated areas of hot text in one document and jump to another, which itself might have more hot text pointing to yet other documents or software. XML (Extensible Markup Language) goes beyond HTML—it is the next evolutionary step in the development of the Internet for formatting and delivering web pages using styles. Unlike HTML, you can create your own tags in XML to describe exactly what the data means, and you can get that data from anywhere on the Web.
 

Multimedia on the Web

Multimedia experiences on the Internet occur on the World Wide Web, programmed within the constraints of HTML, then stretched by the enhanced capabilities provided by XML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
To design and make effective multimedia for this environment, developers need to understand not only how to create and edit the elements of multimedia, but also how to deliver it for HTML browsers and plug-in/ player vehicles. Well-crafted, professionally rendered sites on the Web include text, images, audio, and animation presented in a user-friendly interface that balances the bandwidth deficit against user patience.

Tools for the World Wide Web

A combination of the explosion of tools and user demand for performance stresses the orderly development of the core HTML standard. The stunning growth of the Internet as well as expansion of wireless mobile phone connectivity to the Internet has caused many multimedia developers to redirect their creative efforts toward providing software solutions various fields.

1.Web Servers

The workings of the Web involve communication between two computers: a server and a client. The server delivers a file when a client asks for it. A server is technically not the hardware, but the software—you should invest in server software that will stand up to your intended use.
Any computer can be used as a Web server, as long as it is connected to the Internet and has the appropriate software installed.
Dedicated computers and appliances may be referred to as Web servers as well.
 Leading Web servers include Apache (the most widely-installed Web server), Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) and nginx (pronounced engine X) from NGNIX.

2.Web Browser

Web browsers are applications that run on a user’s personal computer (on the client side on the Internet) to provide
the interactive graphical interface for searching, finding, and viewing text documents, sounds, animations, and other multimedia resources on the Web.
A web browser is a program on your computer that allows you to access websites on the internet. The web is written in a computer language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Browsers translate this so that we can read it easily. There are many browsers available. For example Internet Explorer,  Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera etc.

3.Search Engines

Search engine is a service that allows Internet users to search for content via the World Wide Web (WWW). A user enters keywords or key phrases into a search engine and receives a list of Web content results in the form of websites, images, videos or other online data. The list of content returned via a search engine to a user is known as a search engine results page (SERP).

4.Web Page Makes and Site Builders

To deliver multimedia on the Web today, you should know some HTML,meaning that you must place the proper tags and references into your documents to launch and control your multimedia. Many HTML editors and web page–making applications offer to shortcut your HTML learning curve and working effort.
 Although site building tools seem to remove the need to learn HTML, some knowledge is still important.
• An HTML document can be created or edited using only a text editor.
• Various tools help you create web pages in a WYSIWYG(What you See Is What you Get) editing environment.
• They provide more power and more features specifically geared to exploiting HTML.