Introduction to Web Multimedia

Multimedia (Multimedia) refers to images, sound, music, animation, and video.

Modern web browsers support various multimedia formats.

What is multimedia?

Multimedia encompasses everything we can see and hear: text, books, pictures, music, sound, CDs, videos, DVDs, files, movies, and so on.

Multimedia exists in many ways. On the Internet, you will find many elements embedded in web pages, and today's web browsers support a variety of multimedia formats.

In this tutorial, you will learn about different multimedia formats and how to use them on your web pages.

Browser Support

The first batch of Internet browsers only supported text and were even limited to a single color and a single font.

Subsequent web browsers supported color, fonts, and text styles and added support for images.

Different browsers handle sound, animation, and video in different ways. Some elements are processed inline, some require plugins, and some require ActiveX controls.

You will learn about this in the following chapters.

Multimedia Format

Multimedia elements (such as sound or video) are stored in media files.

The most common method to identify the media type is to check the file extension.

When the browser knows the file suffix is .htm or .html, it assumes the file is an HTML page. The .xml suffix indicates an XML file, while the .CSS suffix indicates a stylesheet.

Image formats are identified by the .gif or .jpeg suffixes.

Multimedia elements also have file formats with different suffixes.

In the following chapters, you will learn more about the knowledge of media file extensions.