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HTML Scripting for QTVR Movies |
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HTML Scripting for QTVR Movies |
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HTML, or "Hypertext Markup Language," refers to the "tags" or special codes you add to a plain text document to create a World Wide Web page. Web authoring tools such as Claris Home Page or MicroSoft Frontpage enable you to create web pages without having to know HTML, however they do not support the specific HTML tags for QuickTime movies (which include QTVR). If you still wish to use web authoring tools, you can include QTVR content in your web pages, but you will probably have to learn the HTML tags for QuickTime movies, and add them to the HTML produced by the web authoring tools.
If you want to create web pages, it can be important to have some familiarity with HTML. It will help you figure out how to add special items such as QTVR to your web pages. The basics of HTML are quite easy, and there are a good number of books available that teach it. For educators who want students to create multimedia documents, HTML is the least expensive way to go, because most web browsers these days are free, and a text editor comes with both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Here are a few good sites on the web that have some good instruction on HTML:
This tutorial will cover the basics of HTML scripting for QTVR movies, and show you some special solutions for QTVR web effects. For more complete information on web authoring for QuickTime movies, see The QuickTime Web Authoring Documentation.
Relative addressing means, when an HTML tag is refering to another file, which may be a graphic, a movie, another HTML document, etc., it is refering to it relative to the location of the document containing the tag. In some cases the reference will be relative to a QTVR movie. This is handy, because we don't have to give an exhaustive description of where the file is. The relationship is based on how folders are enclosed by or enclose other folders. An enclosing folder is called a "parent" of an enclosed folder. Enclosed folders are "child" folders of the "parent" folders that enclose them. For instance, I am developing this web tutorial using files in three different folders which have the following relationship:
I keep all of my HTML files in a folder named "Home Page" that has two "child" folders: "Images" and "Movies." "Images" and "Movies" are "child" folders to the "parent" folder, "Home Page." I put all my QTVR movies in "Movies" and all my other graphics in "Images." This is very helpful for me, because this web site has hundreds of HTML files, images and movies, and it would be hard to keep track of everything if it all were lumped into one folder. I call this a "directory structure" or "folder structure" because it has these specific parent and child relationships, which, if maintained, allow me to move all of my files to another computer and still have my web site work correctly, so long as that structure is maintained.
The relative addressing works like this. If my HTML file (in the "Home Page" folder) refers to a picture called "Camera.gif" in the "Images" folder it would address it thusly: Images/Camera.gif. This means, look in the "Images" folder to find the file "Camera.gif".
Sometimes a QTVR movie will call for a web page (i.e. an HTML file) to be loaded. This is done through something called hot spots, which are discussed in another part of this tutorial. If a QTVR movie called "Pano.mov" in the "Movies" folder calls up a HTML file called "school.htm" in the "Home Page" folder, the addressing looks like this: ../school.htm. The "../" here means to look into the "parent" folder to find the file "school.htm". Notice, we don't really need to know the parent folder name.
The easiest way to get a QTVR movie to show up on a web page is to create a link to a QTVR file through hypertext link that uses words or a picture. When you click on the link, the movie will be loaded onto a new, blank page. You will have no control over where the movie shows up on the new page, and you will not be able to add any extra text, pictures, colors, etc. to the page it is on. The person viewing the movie will have to click on the browser's "Back" button to get back to your web page. Here are a couple of examples:
Littlefield Fountain and the Tower at the University of Texas
The HTML for the above example looks like this:
<A HREF="Movies/UTFtn.mov">Littlefield Fountain and the Tower at the University of Texas</A>
This uses the anchor tag, <A></A>, for making links to different files. The anchor tag surrounds the text "Littlefield Fountain and the Tower at the University of Texas," turning it into a hypertext link to the QTVR movie. The parameter, HREF="Movies/UTFtn.mov" tells us where the link will take us. Notice relative addressing. It is telling the browser to look inside the "child" folder "Movies" to find the QuickTime movie file called "UTFtn.mov".
Clicking on the picture above will bring up the same QTVR movie as the word link above does. The HTML for this example looks like this:
<A HREF="Movies/UTFtn.mov"><IMG SRC="Images/UTFtn.GIF" WIDTH="160" HEIGHT="120"></A>
This uses the same anchor tag as the word example above, but instead of wrapping around some text, the anchor tag is surrounding an IMG tag that puts the thumbnail image on this page. Notice the relative addressing?
If you wish to add text, color, graphics, links, etc. on a web page with a QTVR movie, then you have to embed it on a web page using the <EMBED> tag. Apple's QuickTime Web Authoring page gives a complete listing of all of the parameters used by this tag. The following is a list of web authoring solutions using the tag:
<EMBED> Example