Welcome! This tutorial will get you started on the road to creating Active Channel™ content. Active Channel content is more than just a Web site. It's more than just a channel. It encompases many of the cool new features of Internet Explorer 4.0, such as channels, Dynamic HTML, Theater Mode, multimedia effects, and a host of other goodies that will take your Web site to the next level.
As you progress through this tutorial, you'll learn what Active Channel content is and how to create it. This is a high-level tutorial that will demonstrate the specifics of channels and Dynamic HTML and show you the source code used to create the many examples in the tutorial. You'll find complete, detailed specifications covering channels, Dynamic HTML, and other Internet Explorer 4.0 technologies in the Internet SDK, which you can view or download from the Site Builder Network Web site.
Click on the "What's Going On?" box at left to learn how to use this tutorial.
Please note: You must have ActiveX™ and scripting enabled to use this tutorial.
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Click on the headings at left for more information.
What's Going On? |
What Is a Channel? |
What Is Dynamic HTML? |
Why Create Active Channel Content? |
The names of companies, products, people, characters, and/or data mentioned herein may be fictitious and are in no way intended to represent any real individual, company, product, or event, unless otherwise noted. |
This tutorial is a channel built using lots of Dynamic HTML and is intended for people who design or develop Web sites. Dynamic HTML opens up a whole new set of possibilities for your Web pages. For example, these pages use the onMouseOver and onClick events to display information. You displayed this text using the onClick technique. You can see more details about a topic by keeping any eye out for bold text. Just pass your mouse over bold text and it will flash red. Click the red text to learn more, such as about navigating around the tutorial pages. From time to time, you'll encounter other unique ways of interacting with or navigating a page. Just follow the on-screen instructions.
A channel lets you deliver timely, personalized content to millions of users worldwide on a regular basis. Making a Web site into a channel is easy. All you have to do is create a Channel Definition Format (CDF) file for your site. Once this file is created, you can optimize, personalize, and control the content that is Webcast or "pushed" to Web users. A channel is simply a Web site that uses a CDF file as an index to the site.
Microsoft's Dynamic HTML takes interactivity to the next level. Today's Web pages are static: the user downloads the page from the server, and that's it. Applets and controls add interactivity, but they sit inside a static page and require a high level of programming skill to create. Pages authored with Dynamic HTML come alive using simple scripts, with every element on the page being truly dynamic.
Dynamic HTML isn't an extension to HTML, and it isn't some new programming language. Dynamic HTML establishes a radical new level of interactivity between scripts and the Web page. Every element on the Web page is now changeable, in real time, on the fly, right on the client side. This adds a lot of possibilities for interactivity, including the ability to hide and show text, just like you are seeing now. You'll get tons of details on Dynamic HTML later in the tutorial.
When you pass your mouse over bold text, the cursor changes to a hand, and you'll see additional information, like this text. This is being done with Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). In this tutorial, when you click on some bold text with an ID, an onCLick event handler is called to display the correct text. It's all ultra-neat, and is explained in detail later in the tutorial. It's just one tiny little backwater in a sea of possibilities.
This refers to push technology, the ability of Internet Explorer 4.0 to deliver content to the browser or Active Desktop™ on a scheduled basis. You specify the schedule, and the user can customize it as required. Web sites using push technology are often referred to as channels. Microsoft's implementation of channels is called Channel Definition Format (CDF) which is based on the XML open standard.
Let's see, "all of the elements" would be:
A, ADDRESS, APPLET, AREA, B, BASE, BASEFONT, BGSOUND, BIG, BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, BR, BUTTON, CAPTION, CENTER, CITE, CODE, COL, COLGROUP, COMMENT, DD, DFN, DIR, DIV, DL, DT, EM, EMBED, FONT, FORM, FRAME, FRAMESET, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, HEAD, HR, HTML, I, IFRAME, IMG, INPUT, KBD, LABEL, LI, LINK, LISTING, MAP, MARQUEE, MENU, NEXTID, OBJECT, OL, OPTION, P, PLAINTEXT, PRE, S, SAMP, SCRIPT, SELECT, SMALL, SPAN, STRIKE, STRONG, STYLE, SUB, SUP, TABLE, TBODY, TD, TEXTAREA, TFOOT, TH, THEAD, TITLE, TR, TT, U, UL, VAR, WBR, and XMP.
To navigate from page to page, click the PREVIOUS and NEXT buttons near the top of the page. To go to a specific page, click the CONTENTS button and choose the page from the popup menu. To toggle sound on and off, click the AUDIO button. If you don't click anything, the tutorial pages will display automatically, courtesy of Dynamic HTML. However, to learn the details of channels and Dynamic HTML, move your mouse over the blue boxes at left to display information below. Look for bold text, and click on it to learn more details.