rwc_2001 — Fri, 15 Feb 2002 16:38:41 +0000

Thanks!

I need to tightly control my screen real estate. The demo will be displayed full-screen (no window trimming) on an 800x600 LCD monitor (on a Viewsonic ViewPad1000, see http://www.viewsonic.com/products/viewpad1000.cfm).

I need to be able to display the following:

1. The name of the camera the mouse is currently hovering over. This may be done either via text adjacent to the video area, or by floating text (preferred).

2. Three buttons, to select 1x, 2x2 or 4x4 display modes. Only two of the three buttons will be active at any given time, since one of the video modes will always be in use.

For the demo, there need only be 16 distinct cameras. Clicking on a camera in 2x2 or 4x4 mode should cause that camera to immediately be displayed in 1x mode. In 2x2 mode, cameras 01-04 may always be displayed, and if 4x4 mode, cameras 01-16 will be displayed. Any camera may be displayed in 1x mode.

The video resolutions are:
1x = 752x564
2x2 = 376x282
4x4 = 188x141

All pixels must be displayed in 1x mode, and I've selected a border of 2. The outer border shouldn't move at all in any of the other modes, which means some pixels may need to be shaved from the edges of the video in the 2x2 and 4x4 modes: This is OK.

For the demo, IE 5.x may be assumed, though since the "real" system will have the video delivered via a Netscape plugin, IE 6.x cannot be used until it works with Netscape plugins. I'd also like the "real" system to be browser and platform independent, so I'd like to support the current and one-release-prior versions of the top four browsers (IE 5.x, Netscape 6.x/4.7x, Mozilla 0.9x, and Opera 5/6) on the top three platforms (Windows 9x/2K/XP, Mac9/X, and Linux/BSD).

This leads to all the expected cross-browser and cross-platform issues. Of particular importance is the width of borders: Does a border of 2 consume the same number of pixels on all browsers on all platforms? If not, then a border of 0 will need to be used, and the border will have to be handled manually, either via a much more complex table, or via background color/image and centered video.

I'm using 1st Page as my development environment, though I'm looking at Active State's Komodo for JavaScript development. I'm also using TidyHTML and online syntax checkers to improve my code. Ideally, I'd like my pages to be compatible with the "Viewable on Any Browser" campaign (http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/). Well, not the text browsers...

Thanks again,

-BobC

detox — Fri, 15 Feb 2002 13:28:58 +0000

Whoa !!!

nothing like a big first post!

Have to finish up some work now so will look at it possibly late tonight or early tommorrow