Using the full range of media available on the Internet can be done quickly and seamlessly. But generally not the first time. One of my colleagues likes to repeat that technology teaches patience. Maybe. Viewing all the media variations available through this composition may go easily and may not. Your mileage will vary. If you just read the essay text and do not click any of the links, the viewing experience will be problem free. But, you will be less informed and have a more boring life (humor intended).
One of the first steps to take in viewing this composition is to determine whether the display or monitor setting needs to be changed to show more of the pages displayed. Changing this setting means finding the Control Panel, selecting display or monitor, finding the settings tab that shows the current screen size setting, and changing the setting to a larger pair of numbers, 1280x1040 or higher if possible. Not all computer or display systems have this higher capacity, so pick the highest pixel capacity available.
This composition uses a display feature called frame pages. When this composition opens it shows a left frame and a right frame. The viewer has the power to stretch or shrink the size of any frame. This may be necessary if the content is not showing completely or if dragging the display slider at the bottom or side of the screen to show the rest of the window becomes too much of a bother. Changing the size of a frame is done by placing the screen cursor directly on top of the frame border, then clicking and dragging the frame edge in the desired direction. The cursor will change its shape when it placed directly over a frame border that is resizeable. All frame borders in this composition are resizeable, but that is a feature that a web author can disable.
Most of the links in the frame on the left are designed to appear in the window frame on the right. The viewer can control this independently of the author's design. Right clicking (or hold and clicking with a Mac) on a link will bring up a list of options. One of them is to open the link's page in a new window. This can be done at any time if resizing the frame does not quickly provide satisfactory viewing. Many of the linked pages do not belong to the author, but come from someone else's web site and those authors may so control the design of their web pages that they will not display within a frameset in spite of this author's intention. Clicking the back arrow or closing the window that opened on top of the composition may be necessary.
The good news is that the computer code for displaying images is already present in the web browser, so there is generally very little problem with displaying images. The standard file formats that display pictures on the web are well known and widely used. That is the last of the good news.
That is, many types of media require a special player or plug-in that may not yet be installed on the viewer's computer. Expecting that a link will lead to hearing music will create some frustration when the correct media player is not installed and the music does not arrive. The viewer might see a strange mix of text characters scrolling down the screen or a dialog box that prompts the viewer to download and install some application. There may also never be a prompt to explain why certain media did not display. By the time the viewer is done dealing with such distractions, the reader will have also lost their train of thought about the content of the page being viewed. Such is life in cyberspace.
Fortunately, once a player is installed for a certain type of file, it will not have to be done again the next time this file type is encountered. Unfortunately, there are many different files types for audio, video, animation, virtual reality and other types of media. The viewer's computer may already be prepared for this array of file types or it may not. The viewer will just have to learn to find competent technical help with problems or move on if some link turns out to be a dead end.
Where the viewing of this composition takes place is also important. More specifically, many of the media files for audio and video are very large. If the computer is in a place with slow Internet connections, it may take minutes or even hours for certain files to play. Though the media elements created for this composition by this author have been deliberately kept very small so that viewers with 56kb modems could expect reasonable speed, a web composer has no control over the size of files that a viewer might select from someone else's web site. If a media piece is taking too long, click the back arrow or click another link and move on to something else.
Start parent frame | Page author: Houghton