WebTV is gaining popularity with Web users, and there are some tricks to
creating pages that work well on it. There are also two special tags and
several attributes for HTML tags that are only supported by WebTV or have
interesting effects. The advantage to using these tags is that WebTV tags
will be ignored by other browsers, but will enhance your pages for TV viewers.
Remember that WebTV viewers are viewing your page on
a TV, usually from across a room. This means that while there is less
resolution, you really don't need it.
Pages look best when they are rendered in white text
on a black background. This is the opposite of most Web pages on the Internet
right now.
Make sure your page displays in less than 544 pixels.
There is no horizontal scrolling in WebTV, and anything larger will be
modified by the WebTV browser to display in that width.
Only 12 characters are visible of the title in the
"Recent" panel. To make your site more relevant, focus on keeping the first 12
characters clear and distinctive.
Links are marked as "clickable" by an orange box
highlighting them. This is especially important to remember when your links
are important to the look of your page.
Because they are not using a computer, they cannot
download things. So, if your site relies on PDF files to be viewed, it will be
inaccessible to WebTV viewers.
Some of the newer versions of WebTV support some download file types, such
as ZIP, but I don't recommend relying on that availability of you're planning
a WebTV compatible page.
The Key to WebTV
If you want WebTV users to be among your readers, then you
need to test out your pages on a WebTV box or viewer. WebTV offers a "viewer"
for Mac and PC users to download and get an idea of what the WebTV system is
like.
http://developer.msntv.com/Tools/WebTVVwr.asp But the best
way to check out WebTV is on a WebTV system. If you don't have one, you can
go to a store that sells them and look at your page from there.
| 