WebTV

WebTV was formed in 1995 and was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. It is popular in the USA and Japan. Although there are some special considerations in publishing data on this system, it basically works and renders in the same way as standard web browsers on a computer and can handle CSS, JavaScript and common audio and video formats.

Screen

One of the biggest controlling issues is the displayable screen size. This is only 420 x 560 pixels, smaller than the old standard 640 x 480 VGA resolution. When this is coupled with the requirement for larger font and graphic sizes, it becomes clear that web managers must carefully control and limit document contents.

The browser window is quite different from that usually seen on a PC screen. It is quite restricted and can render pages in a suprising way, for example, will crush a page it to make it fit.

Navigation

Internal hyperlinking navigation now becomes essential in order to reduce the amount of scrolling that any user must undertake.

Text

Only 12 characters of a page’s title will be stored in the ‘recent’ panel, but 25 characters will be stored in the bookmark section. All titling must therefore be very specific and meaningful.

Colours

The colour palette available on a television is not as large as that on a full-colour PC so images must be designed carefully. This is especially important when text is used within the graphic. The system does support all standard graphic formats such as GIF, JPEG and PNG.

Frames

A website that is organised around a frames environment will not render well on a WebTV system. All frames are automatically converted into tables, which can result in very unfriendly sites.

Version of HTML

WebTV supports the use of HTML 4.

Downloadable files

The user cannot download files when using this system. Because there is no hard disk, there is nowhere to store files such as images or PDFs.

There is a WebTV browser emulator available for computers. Using this allows a web manager to see what pages will look like when they are displayed on WebTV. The emulator can be downloaded from the WebTV website.