n the Web was introduced, it was all text. Soon graphics were added and opened up new possibilities. Photographs and drawings could be used to illustrate and explain products and accessories, to demonstrate the workings of technology and nature, or just to make pages more attractive. Multimedia was introduced using tools such as Java and Shockwave ("Multimedia"). Now Web pages display animations, play sound, and allow you to interact with them. It’s possible to experience full multimedia over the Internet or intranets.Multimedia isn’t just for expensive commercial productions. It can be used to enhance ordinary communications. Using technology such as Microsoft’s OLE and ActiveX or OpenDoc, you can insert sound and movie objects into other applications such as work processing or spreadsheet documents ("Multimedia). Double clicking on the embedded icon in the document runs the media clip or plays the sound.Windows Media Player controls Multimedia-hardware devices and plays media sequences, such as video clips, animations, and sounds. Media Player can be embedded in a document belonging to another application. It lets you start, pause, and stop the sound or movie or drag a scroll bar to quickly move to a specific spot.Databases called universal servers are now able to store the elements that are displayed on the screen. Fields are used to store images, text, sound files, and videos. The multimedia program draws on these stored elements to create the show. These powerful databases, accessed over networks, are the new organizational libraries. The still images you see in multimedia programs (and many that you see in print) have been created or manipulated on a computer in a digital format. There are two basic forms of computer graphics: bitmaps and vector graphics.Bitmap images are formed from a matrix of pixels with different colors. Bitmap images are defined by their dimensions in pixels as well as by the ...
