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No matter how you code the HTML for the web page, WYSINotWYG,
i.e.. "What you see in Internet Explorer
ver 5.x or Netscape 4.x browsers will not be what
you get on the TV screen"!!
We need a series of "work arounds" to start the process.
Remember the final result is what you see on your TV set using the "WEBTV"
set top box.
Before we go into the details of coding for Liberate POPTV, lets look
at a table comparing the standards and coding. In this case we will show
a comparison between Microsoft TV and Liberate
POP TV.
The coding standards for the Sony WebTV and Microsoft TV set top boxes
are as follows:
See a short
description of each of the above standards, derived from the Microsoft
CD "Interactive Television Workshop, 12.14.99.
Screen Size The active area on the TV screen is 560 x 420
pixels . The useful area in TV Mode is 560 x 420
pixels. The useful area in Web Mode is about 544x 372
pixels.
A very good explanation about of TV screen sizes and resolution can be
found in the WebTv developer site. http://developer.webtv.net/design/resolution/resolution.htm. View a
local copy of this page.
Screen Size Considerations In Web
Mode

How To Start The Process a. Firstly, open a graphics editing
program, such as Photoshop, and layout an area of 560 x420 pixels.
Then create a 3mm wide rectangle of 544 x 372 pixels to show a
"safe area" that outlines the worst case viewable screen area to
accommodate various TV sets. This represents a 90% safe area. b. Then
draw rectangles to represent the TV Picture-In-Picture screen area,
graphics text areas and layers. This give an idea of relative sizes of the
elements. c. Write down the x,y coordinates ( this represents top and
left attributes for placement) d. Place the image( gif or jpg) in a
generic HTML page and view the HTML file in the MICROSOFT
TV Simulator. (File size=9MB). e. Then view the page in the actual
TV set using the set top box. View the test image
in the Microsoft TV in the Simulator first, then in the actual TV set
using the set top box.
Conversions to TV and WebTV Screen Resolutions Televisions
have a smaller screen resolution than computer monitors, and the WebTV
browser does not allow horizontal scrollbars. This means that all Web
page content must be compressed or otherwise made to fit in a 544
pixel-wide space. The WebTV browser applies different rules to do this as
gracefully as possible, but problems can sometimes arise. HTML text is
never compressed with the WebTV browser. Text will be "re-flowed" to fit
the space it is allotted, but the size of the HTML text will change
depending on how it is coded. See the next section on Coding
Text. Conversely, single images may be compressed to make them fit
into a 544 pixel-wide space.
Web pages can be scrolled using the WebTV controller when the Web page
is viewed in "Web Mode". There is no scrolling function if the Web page is
in "TV mode". See the section on Sample Pages
for more details.
REFERENCES 1. The WEBTV site has a
good overview of coding for the Sony WEBTV set top box. Go to http://developer.webtv.net/ 2.
Microsoft TV Advanced Content Developer Kit (CDK)
Beta. Visit http://premium.microsoft.com/tv/contentdev/cdk/default.asp 3.
Web TV ITV web site has many examples of templates for Microsoft TV . Go
to http://itv.webtv.net/ 4. An
excellent source book is Building Interactive Entertainment and
E-Commerce content for Microsoft TV, by Peter
Krebs, Charlie Kindschi, Julie Hammerquist.
Published by Microsoft Press, 2000. ISBN 0-7356-0628-5 5. Search
Altavist, Google or Techcrawler for "webtv authoring". 6. Some specific
topics: General Authoring: http://developer.webtv.net/authoring/
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