How do I get started with iHD?

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Many DVD authoring professionals may be wondering how they can get started with HD DVD. Probably the first thing to do is to download the iHD Jumpstart kit and get yourself a good XML editor (like the free Visual Studio Web Developer edition) and a graphics program like Photoshop or the Microsoft Expressions beta. This will allow you to create iHD content and play it back on your PC.

But the tools aren't much good if you don't know how to use them. You can look at the very basic samples in the iHD download, or look at some of the samples on my blog, but the best way to go from zero to hero (*cringe*) is to get a good book on HTML programming for the web.

iHD's concepts are very similar to those used on the web -- you have some content elements (like divs, buttons, and paragraphs) and then you make them look pretty by giving them styles (like CSS -- Cascading Style Sheets). You then make things happen by writing small blocks of script code, just like a web page. The only thing that doesn't have a good parallel with web programming is the XPath-based timing engine, but hopefully I will be writing more about that in the not-too-distant future. You don't really need to know much about XML to write iHD; learning HTML is probably enough to get started, and any decent XML editor will help write the correct XML syntax for you (or, at least, tell you where you went wrong :-) ).

So if you know nothing about web development, or if you haven't really learnt anything new since 1995, I would suggest picking up a book on HTML programming -- just make sure it covers CSS and some basic JavaScript! Don't pick up one of those really thick books that contain a full reference to every DHTML object, property, and method, since that will not do you any good. You want to know about the basics of HTML structure, the basics of CSS and styling, and a little bit about script (which you might be better off getting a different book for -- again, just make sure it isn't full of HTML object references, because that's a waste of your time).

There are also lots of references on the web for HTML, CSS, and Script... unfortunately I don't have any personal recommendations right now; let me know if you find something particularly good!