All that Multimedia

I got confused about which one we were supposed to read as well, so I just read them both (yay!).

Flash, video, and audio multimedia embedding - the theme of this chapter could not have come soon enough. Video and audio could be great additions to some of the client projects, and dreamweaver makes them surprisingly and ridiculous easy to add to your page. I hadn't even considered video embedding for the interactive portion of the client project - but this could actually work out really well with mine as I know of a few great computer science videos out there!

Plus a really nice thing with video is if for whatever reason a developer wants to use a video they don't personally have on their machine, Youtube and such sites tend to give you an HTML embed link on the page - it's a s simple as copy-pasting to videos that are hosted elsewhere!

Flash is an interesting idea for a webpage and I've always loved what people are able to do with it. I definitely want to learn more about making flash projects, and it's so cool how dreamweaver can just seamlessly integrate them. Hopefully I'll get to take a shot at that sometime soon when I have the time to devote to learning flash...this just inspired me more!

Finally, I wanted to chime in again on the 'why not to use tables for navigation' discussion we were having in class. I found this really great article covering some of the top points why CSS is superior to tables in basically everything except a table's primary function which is tabular data.
http://www.chromaticsites.com/blog/13-reasons-why-css-is-superior-to-tables-in-website-design/

Some of the top points I noted were accessibility (screen readers used by the visually impaired have a tougher time with tables than with CSS), loadtime/data usage/hosting costs (tables take up more processing power to generate, which in turn makes the page load longer, use more data, and ups the costs for the host), and easier maintenance/redesign (as it's easier to update a stylesheet when an issue arises than to visit every page and alter a the navigation table).

"Web design is art wrapped in technology." - James Weaver