Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Reference

How It Works

When QuickTime's HTML importer is invoked, it scans an HTML document in search of media that QuickTime can play. It does this by looking for specific HTML elements, namely <a>, <embed>, and <img>, in order of preference.

For example, the following HTML document contains an <a> element that describes an animated GIF with a link to another HTML document.

<HTML> <a href="http://somewhere.net/main.html"> <img src="http://somewhere.net/winkinnblinkin.gif"></a> </HTML>

When QuickTime imports this document, it creates a movie that plays the animated GIF "winkinnblinkin.gif" and which, when clicked, will cause the preferred browser to display the linked HTML document, "http://somewhere.net/main.html".

QuickTime supports the following attributes of the <a> element: "href" and "target". It supports the following attributes of the <img> element: "src", "width", "height", and "ismap".

The QuickTime HTML importer also works with media described within the <embed> element, as in the following example:

<HTML> <EMBED SRC="rtsp://somewhere.net/mymovie.mov" WIDTH=192 HEIGHT=160 HREF="http://www.somewhere.net/main.html"> </HTML>

When QuickTime imports this document, it creates a movie that plays the RTSP stream "mymovie.mov" and which, when clicked, will cause the preferred browser to display the linked HTML document, "http://somewhere.net/main.html".

QuickTime supports the following attributes of the <embed> element: "src", "width", "height", "href", "target", "volume", "loop", and "autoplay".

Additional Notes

Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Reference