tailieunhanh - Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer- P4

Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer- P4:It was a simple solution to a complex problem. On one side, thousands of designers and art directors are eager to take their talents to the Web but aren’t sure how. On the other, web agencies could not find enough good web designers to get their work done. | Taking Your Talent to the Web 41 It s the Bandwidth Stupid Aside from corporate users and a few lucky folks with Digital Subscriber Line DSL or cable modem access most people view the Web through dialup connections which are not exactly peppy. In every multimedia format digital compression is used to compensate for the narrowness of the user s pipe the limitations of her bandwidth. As mentioned earlier bandwidth represents the rate at which web content may be downloaded to the enduser s computer. Remember David Siegel s cry of Clarity Brevity Bandwidth Bandwidth is arguably the most important component of this trinity. Web users will spend more time with mediocre sites that load fast than they will waiting for beauty that takes forever to show up on their screens. Q. What s the most popular button on the Web A. The Back button. Dialup modems top out at 56K. That s 56 kilobits or 6 kilobytes per second. Actually it s even less than that The FCC mandates a top speed of 53K. Read the fine print on your modem. Due to modem overheads ranging from 1 to 15 phone line noise server traffic levels Internet congestion and the alignment of the planets modems rarely if ever actually achieve their top speed. modems can do no better than per second and frequently do less. modems typically deliver 3 to per second. In ideal conditions under a blue moon on the Twelfth of Never a home user is downloading less than 6K per second. So a 600K movie will take at least 100 seconds to download to the user s computer. The greater a format s compression ratio the fewer kilobytes or megabytes your visitors have to download and the sooner they can start enjoying what you have to offer. Flash RealPlayer QuickTime and Windows Media Player all stream their content begin playing the file soon after downloading begins . But even streaming formats are limited by the bandwidth constrictions of the enduser s modem. Streaming or not no multimedia format can pour its data faster than