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LIS 7008 - Information Technologies and Systems
Spring 2016 - Section 01
Assignment 4
This homework is due on your course Web site before the beginning of next class session.
Partial credit may be awarded.
For this week's assignment, we will integrate multiple media onto a
single Web page. Along the way, we'll learn a bit about how to find
this stuff. The assignment is to build a Web page with the following
content:
- A lecture video from the Web. Some example videos are available from
here and there.
Your page must point directly to the video, not to a Web page which provides a clickable link to the video.
If you have trouble accessing these videos, you can use other lecture videos on the Web. Do not download lecture
videos and upload them to the class Web server, because it may violate the copyright law for doing so. It is nice but not
required to embed the video in your Web page for this task.
- An audio greeting in your own voice. You need a computer microphone for recording your voice.
The audio greeting should
not play automatically; rather, it should be played when the user clicks the play button.
In other words, try to embed an audio player into your Web page.
You may record the greeting any way that you like, but Windows XP contains a sound recorder that is
suitable for this task [Start->All
Programs->Accessories->(Entertainment->)Sound Recorder]. You
can find my sample audio file if you want to see how this comes out.
- A link to a tutorial that explains how JPEG or MP3 really
works. The trick here is to find a tutorial that provides a useful
degree of insight without getting lost in math. Your goal should be
to find an explanation that you think you and your classmates would
really find useful. The tutorial does not need to be a video.
- A cartoon that contains a donkey found using Google Image Search
(http://www.google.com, select "Images"). Your page must include the
cartoon as an inline image, not just as a clickable link to the image.
- A video lecture on Mars exploration that you can find using any Web search engine.
NASA provides an example here (Note: you do not have to use this example).
Your link should go directly to the video rather than just the search engine. For this task, you need to either embed the video in your
Webpage or make a link to a webpage that allows to play the video directly.
Save your Web page for this homework as hw4.html (or any filename you like), then create another Web page
named as 7008.html, which has the following content:
John Smith's LIS 7008 Homework (suppose you are John Smith):
- Homework 1
- Homework 2
- Homework 3
- Homework 4
- Homework 5
- Homework 6
Add a link from "Homework 4" to your hw4.html. Your 7008.html page must be
accessible from this URL:
http://classes.slis.lsu.edu/wu/7008/sp16/your_folder/7008.html (where "your_folder" is
is your first initial followed by your last name, all in lower case, such as jsmith for John Smith).
Note that you must use the standard filename "7008.html".
If you like, you can also add a link from Homework 2 and Homework 3 to your earlier assignments.
This will allow you to add access points to all of your homework assignments.
Whether or not making a link from this 7008.html Web page to any of your earlier assignments is your choice, but
I encourage you to do this so that you have a Web site with all of your 7008 assignments.
You do not need to send me your URL again, because I know your userid
from the URL for your homework 2.
If you have already had a 7008.html page named for any of your earlier assignments, please rename it as
something else (such as 7008_hw1.html, 7008_hw2.html, 7008_hw3.html), so that when you FTP your new 7008.html file
to your SLIS Web space your old 7008.html will not be replaced.
Make sure I can access your hw4.html Web page by clicking the "Homework 4" link from your
7008.html page.
Warning again: Your Homework 4 must be accessible from
http://classes.slis.lsu.edu/wu/7008/sp16/your_folder/7008.html (where "your_folder"
is your first initial followed by your last name, all in lower case)
by clicking the "Homework 4" link; otherwise, you will get 0 points because you will not be emailing me your URL again.
This mimics your project client's requirements.
You may use any tools that you find useful (e.g., HTML
editors, search engines) when designing these two Web pages, but I would like to encourage you to hand-code them.
Here is a tutorial about
embedding multimedia into your html page. You can also
search this topic on the Web to get more tutorials, such as How To Embed
Sound on a Web Page. Note that not all audio formats are supported by all browsers. Please check the
HTML5 Audio webpage for the audio formats and their supported browsers.
Common problems reported by current and/or previous students:
- Problem: my image did not show up on the browser.
You might have put a wrong path to the image in the href link. Also check the filename and its extension of the image:
donkey.JPG is different from donkey.jpg or DONKEY.jpg due to case-sensitivity.
- Problem: my embedded audio does not play.
Check the file extension of your audio file; audio.WAV is different from audio.wav due to case-sensitivity. Also some browsers may not like empty spaces in your file name,
so please replace empty spaces in your file name with a hyphen or underscore.
- Problem: my embedded MP3 audio plays with IE but not Firefox.
Please check the path of the file. If you cannot make sure the path is correct, simply put the HTML and the audio files together under the same folder.
If you cannot find an embedding method that satisfies all major browsers, you may post various embedding methods for various browsers.
- Problem: WAV audio files can be embedded into a Webpage and be played by both IE and Firefox without any problem; however,
WMA audio files can be played by IE but not Firefox (or by Firefox but not IE).
If you have saved your audio file as WAV, you have an easy job here. However, if you have saved your audio file as WMA,
you can either convert WMA to WAV or MP3 (using a converter you can find on the Web, such
as zamzar.com and media.io), otherwise you have a little bit
more work to do. Here are some references for embedding WMA/WMV videos:
Grading Rubric:
- This homework must be made accessible on your course Website. Submission of audio, video, image files as
email attachments will not be graded. If you cannot make any part work,
you can simply state that on your Web page. For instance, if you have created your audio greeting, but failed
to embed it, then you can simply post that statement on your Web page. Good HW4 examples will be announced after
this homework is graded.
- Note: Some browsers are more lenient with incorrect html markup than others.
I will use Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox to grade this homework.
Points will be deducted for the task not displayed properly by either IE or Firfox. So please test your Web page with both IE and Firefox.
- +5: creating the 7008.html page (-5 for using a filename other than "7008.html" or the file is not accessible from the specified URL)
- +5: creating the HW4 Web page (the filename can be anything you like)
- +15: Task 1 (linking to a lecture video; embedding not required)
- +20: Task 2 (+10 for creating your audio greeting, +10 for embedding it; -5 if audio plays automatically in either IE or Firefox)
- +15: Task 3 (linking to a JPEG/MP3 tutorial)
- +20: Task 4 (embedding an inline donkey cartoon)
- +20: Task 5 (linking to a video about Mars exploration; embedding not required)
- -10: if any audio/video is embedded, but does not play in IE or Firefox.
Yejun Wu
(acknowledgment to Doug Oard)