[angel04]

ok, I got to jeffgordon.com daily. Yeah, I know, a little obsessive but I love nascar and all the drivers. Anyway, the site has taken up the cause of posting smartvideo streaming video clips of Jeff and his pr appearances etc. The thing that's annoying is that I have all the software and utilities on my computer to play the videos but all I see are the fancy smartvideo graphics, no Jeff or video clips. The audio comes through great, just no pictures.
It requires Windows Media Player 9, which I have and IE 5.5 or higher, I have IE 6.0. So, what's going wrong on my end???
thanks
tina

Per ardua ad astra
Motto of the Royal Canadian Air Force
"through adversity to the stars"
www.jeffgordon.com

[(JD)]

hi angel well, lol if you have been around much at all you know I have plenty of probs with figuring out the computer! However, some places I go I have to specifically view the clip through the media player... but don't ask how I manage that, I can't recall right now.

Dex will probably know...

I have also had trouble because of the settings on my computer, graphics and blocks and such not allowing me to view what I wanted to...

good luck

<font color=green> ...slip sliding away... slip sliding away....

[dexter]

All Dex knows is that he isn't seeing the video either... nor is he hearing the sound. He tried the site using the Firefox browser but hasn't tried using Internet Explorer yet. He doesn't know what "Smartvideo" is supposed to refer to and what is needed to play it, windows media player or something else that he needs to download??? Before he figures that out he has to find out why he is talking about himself in the third person all of a sudden...

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--http://www.idexter.com

[(JD)]

Hate to break it to ya, but I had NO TROUBLE with Jeff's site! I am using IE and all the updates available.

Did you use the little button that says CHECK YOUR Monitor or computer... for video here...

and then if there's a needed update, it will give you that info and you can do that...

good luck.

I met Jeff in person and had a nice conversation with him years ago ? when he first came on the scene and went around with his car for publicity. I passed on the free photo with him though... not sure I'd do that again...

<font color=green> ...slip sliding away... slip sliding away....

[dexter]

It might be because I am using the Firefox browser now.

A little bit of technological history... there is a group that designs and sets the worldwide standards for the web... for HTML and how certain commands are supposed to behave.

Web browsers are supposed to follow those standards, so that when web page designers set up the code for the page, they know how it will be interpreted by browsers.

Notice I said "supposed to."

Back when Netscape and Internet Explorer were battling to be the dominate browser one thing they both did was add features to their browsers. Some of these features were things that were not addressed in the HTML standard and some were slightly different ways of interpreting the standards. As a result, Netscape and Internet Explorer would display some pages somewhat differently.

Flash forward to today and almost every browser available has things that will make a page go all screwy when viewed. It makes it very difficult for web designers... instead of just coding a page to the standards, they have to test their page on different browsers and on different platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) and if something doesn't work in one browser, they have to change the code so that it will work in that browser but change it in such a way that it still works in the first browser. Sometimes it is a challenge to get a page to load correctly in all the different browsers. Usually "correctly" is often thrown out the window... just having it open "acceptably" is usually the goal.

Many web designers don't do that... they may only code for Internet Explorer and nothing else since that is the most popular browser. That's not a good idea for a commercial site, for example, because you don't want to turn away customers who may be using other browsers.

Making things even more complicated is how "fancy" our web pages have become... we don't only expect text, pictures and links in a flexible layout... we want animated graphics, flash presentations, items that hide and show as you move the mouse around the page, live media, things like "speed video" .

So which browser does it "right"? there is some irony there. Internet Explorer is the browser that most often disobeys the web standards. Almost any other browser adhere's more strictly to the Web Consortiums standards. Therefore Internet Explorer is most likely to be displaying a page "incorrectly". However since IE is so popular, web designers always make sure they're web pages look perfect (according to their intentions) in Internet Explorer first and then try to fix up things for other browsers as possible. So although IE may be displaying the page "incorrectly" it is more likely to be showing the page the way the designer intended it to look.

To add insult to injury, IE version 6 fixed some display bugs that were in version 5. Because of that, some pages that had "fixes" in place to work around those display bugs no longer display properly in version 6. To accomodate that, there is actually an HTML command that a web designer can use, can incorporate at the top of his page, that tells IE 6 to go into a mode where it intentionally reproduces the errors that existed in version 5. HA! It is actually called "quirks mode" and the command (tag) has the word "quirksmode" right in it. The command tells the browser to intentionally misbehave so that the page will look right after fixing the errors.

Seems like a mess, no? In some ways it is... but for the most part the web really works very well.

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--http://www.idexter.com