The program that I originally used to surf the web was Mosaic but soon Netscape. After trying version 1.0 then 1.1 out--after a year with an early version of Mosaic--I never went back. The newest Netscape versions were much better (and a bit faster) than all earlier versions. Apple's Safari is the de facto standard for Macs since OS X. Internet Explorer obviously is very long in the tooth now.
The html pages on my site I initially constructed using the ubiquitous SimpleText program shipped with almost every Mac (now TextEdit). I missed the key short-cuts that are available in Word or PageMaker but not in SimpleText, but you just can't beat the boot time for the program. Later Netscape's Composer module became my HTML editor of choice. MS Word's html export still left (and still leaves) a lot to be desired, but Composer's file had to be edited by hand to include java script. I use Dreamweaver now and still author html by hand on occasion.
All of the graphic images were initially drawn using SuperPaint 3.0 except for the scanned or plotted data. All images were uploaded as GIF images after their conversion using GIFConverter. In early 1997 I dropped SuperPaint for Freehand and I haven't looked back. Graphic Converter is a reasonably priced graphic utility that I initially purchased in the mid 1990's and have updated many times since. It's still very useful.
All of the video images on my site have been flattened so that people using Windows machines can try to view them. My upload/download utility is Fetch 4.0x. This was one of the best pieces of freeware available on the planet which, alas, has gone commercial! but is still free to educators.
QuickTime 3.0's release in early 1998 greatly changed the file compression algorithms available, and movie and sound files created after the summer of 1998 require users to have QuickTime 3.x or great capability. Later QuickTime files require QuickTime 4.x or 5.x or 6.x. That upgrade is free from Apple to all platforms here.
"After QuickTime came Macromedia's Shockwave Flash." Since my instrumentation primers have increased in size and complexity, in QuickTime it has become necessary to compress the results extensively to maintain anything approaching a downloadable web-based file size. Even at the wider bandwidths available file now--as compared to 1996 for instance--about 15 MB took a log time to load in 2001.
The problem, of course is that file quality degrades with compression even with the more complex/powerful compression algorithms like Sorenson that are available with the later version of QuickTime. And the voice compression available with QuickTime is much less than perfect. Enter Flash. As the comparison of files sizes here show, Flash files are substantially smaller that even there highly compressed QuickTime counterparts. QuickTime is dead! Long live QuickTime.
The newest video experiments in the department of chemistry at SHSU involve teaching video for our freshman laboratory. These use our QuickTime streaming server and are leading to large format streaming videos.
