The Experience of the Web

Today’s World Wide Web presents an ever-diversified experience of multimedia, programming language, and real-time communication. It is a challenge to keep up with the rapid pace of developments.

Multimedia. The web has become a broadcast medium. It is possible to listen to audio and video over the web, both pre-recorded and live. For example, you can visit the sited of various news organizations and view the same video shown on the nightly television news. Several plugins are available for viewing these videos. For example, Apple’s Quick Time Player downloads files with the mov extension and displays these as “movies” in a small window on your computer screen. Quick Time files can be quite large, as it may take patience to wait for the entire movie to download into your computer before you can view it.

The problem of slow download times has been answered by a revolutionary development in multimedia capability: streaming media. In this case, audio or video files are played as they are downloading, or streaming, into your computer. Only a small wait, called buffering, is necessary before the file begins to play. The RealPlayer plug-in plays streaming audio and video files. Extensive files such as interviews, speeches and hearings work very well with RealPlayer. The RealPlayer is also ideal for the broadcast of real-time events. These may include press conferences, live radio and television broadcasts, concerts, etc.

Sound files, including music, may also be heard on the Web. It is not uncommon to visit a Web page and hear background music.

Live cams are another aspect of the multimedia experience available on the Web. Live cams are video cameras that send their data in real time to a Web server. These cams may appear in all kinds of locations, such as an office, on top of a building, a scenic locale, a special event, and so on. Text, audio and video communication can occur in real time on the Web. This capability allows people to conference and collaborate in real time. In general, the faster the Internet connection, the more successful the experience