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by Gary W. Priester
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the browser... You thought you had it all figured out. There was Navigator and Internet Explorer, and you finally figured out how to get pages to look good in both. Now you learn that there's a growing part of the Web being viewed by people not through a computer, but on their TV. And you learn that for these people, what looks good on the two main browsers may not look so good on TV. And you think, "Oh, no, here we go
again." And you're right. But you can design a site that works on both major browsers--and on WebTV--and I'll tell you how.
As the name implies, WebTV is a marriage between the Web and TV. To paraphrase the old Certs commercial, it's two, two, two technologies in one! WebTV provides the ability to surf the Web from just about any TV set. The price of the WebTV "set top box," which connects to the TV and the user's phone line to enable access to the Internet, is affordable—$99 for the basic service called WebTV Classic and $199 for the bells and whistles version known as WebTV Plus. (The monthly fees are on a par with most Internet Service Providers' fees, roughly $24). These affordable prices make the Internet available to anyone with a TV and a phone line, so anyone in the United States, Canada, or Japan (the countries currently supporting WebTV) can have access to the Web, e-mail, and Internet chat, even if they do not own a computer. This is what the information superhighway (remember that phrase?) is all about. Not long ago, Web pages were all text with the occasional image. Browser backgrounds were gray and the text was either Helvetica or Times Roman. Links were blue, and going from one dull Web site to another dull Web site via the
Hyper Link was about as fun as it got. Web sites were created more with a knowledge of HTML than anything else. By comparison, Web sites today are alive with color and action and are visually exciting and mentally stimulating. The majority of people surfing the 'Net today have fast Internet access, thanks to dirt cheap modems, equally dirt cheap computers, and often the latest Netscape or Internet Explorer browser, for free or else almost free, due to the
generosity made possible by the ongoing browser wars. Unlike a half-dozen years ago, being a Web designer today is fun. Powerful software, such as NetObjects Fusion, has removed the need to deal with all of the behind-the-scenes scripting. Screen size: One size fits small But what if you had to go back to square one? What if you had to assume your viewer was viewing your Web page at 640 by 480 pixels. Or smaller? WebTV, because it uses a TV screen instead of a monitor, displays your page at a width of 544 pixels. Not exactly Super VGA, is it? And because WebTV visitors are not sitting 18 inches away from their TV, your text has to be considerably larger if you want it to be readable. Any font, as long as it's Helvetica Font tags that let you specify Verdana or Tahoma or Georgia don't work with WebTV, which supports only two fonts, Helvetica and Monaco (the old Macintosh answer to Times Roman). This is, in reality, only one font since most sites don't use mono-spaced fonts anyway, except to fill in forms. It's like Henry Ford's choice of colors for the original Model T Ford--any color you want so long as it's black. You can use any font you like, so long as it's Helvetica. Subtle colors or images with text overprinted or reversed out in white are not a good idea as these can be very difficult,
if not impossible, to read. White, which is very attractive on your computer monitor, can be overpowering on WebTV. The same holds true for most brightly colored backgrounds. Since the keyboard is only an option and not included with the two basic WebTV services—Classic and Plus—many WebTV surfers will be navigating your site with a remote control using arrow keys to find their way around. So, in many ways, designing for WebTV is like taking a giant step back to the early '90s! OK. So how
do you go about designing for WebTV? The good news is that many of the innovations and breakthroughs we use today on our Web sites will work with WebTV, including Cascading Style Sheets (minus text styles, unless the text is Helvetica), Flash (version 1 on WebTV
Classic and version 2 on WebTV Plus), chat (but not Java-based chat), cookies (most kinds, except with the secure attribute), frames, forms (see my comments below), image maps, Java scripts (but not Java), animated GIFs, audio, video, and more. When designing for WebTV, designers need to keep in mind the old KISS formula, Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. Whereas WebTV supports most of the elements we build into our Web pages today, it does not always support them in the manner
to which we might expect. Here are some things to keep in mind, if you want to design a site to be WebTV compatible. For more articles and information about designing for WebTV, see The WebTV Viewer is a helpful utility that introduces the reality of WebTV into the design process. Here is a screen capture of the page (created in NOF 4 by the way) as seen in my Microsoft Explorer 4.0 browser.
Now here's what it looks like after WebTV has reformatted it.
Ouch! The good news is my subtle background appears in the Viewer. The bad news is it's the only thing that is subtle. That hideous yellow box around the logo in the upper left-hand corner is not part of my design. It's WebTV's identification of a linked graphic. Why the two arrows or the page buttons are not so identified remains a mystery. Notice the Page Notes window to the right of the WebTV Viewer. This window displays error messages for various potential problems identified by the Viewer. The only major problem here was flagged by the yellow triangle with the exclamation point and informs me that WebTV has shrunk my table. While there are several other notes, none appears to be too serious. The JavaScript rollover buttons did not appear to work in the Viewer, but they may indeed work in an actual WebTV box. The read-me file that accompanies the WebTV Viewer suggests that you view the page in an actual WebTV setup if in doubt. Many retail stores have a WebTV setup in their showrooms. You can see that only about one-third of the copy (that fills one screen on my IE 4 browser) appears in the WebTV page.
I tried clicking on a mailto: link (a link that brings up the standard e-mail form) and received an error message informing me that most Web addresses begin with http://. I was assured by the WebTV people that this was not a problem and when the WebTV Classic or Plus user had established an e-mail account that mailto: e-mail links will indeed function.
The real test, of course, is to buy a WebTV box or live close enough to a store that has one and get friendly with the salespeople—I recommend cookies or cappucino's—so they don't mind you coming in all of the time to test your sites. Just as you really need to have both Netscape and IE on your computer to see what pages really look like on them, there's no substitute for testing your site on a WebTV box. The Net Net All and all, it was not the nightmare I had expected. But it was no picnic either. There are many considerations to be made if one has to design to be WebTV-compatible. But they all come back to the KISS formula, Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. More important, however, do you need your site to be accessible to WebTV users? Is the content of your site such that you might expect WebTV visitors? If so, then you might
be wise to design a WebTV-safe site as there are now some 1 million-plus WebTV users and the number is growing daily. As most of the sites I design are designed with graphics professionals and advanced users in mind, I don't think it would be worth the tradeoff. On the other hand, if I ever need to develop a Web site for the general public, I will give careful consideration to designing for WebTV. For more information on WebTV, and to download the WebTV Viewer, visit (where else?)
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There is an option, found in Preference s, to set the text size smaller which actually fits about half of the text from the original page. But you need to consider the viewer is not sitting directly in front of the TV, but probably
several feet away. So the large text is the more realistic option and hence the need to keep the text short and to the point.
