DOCUMENT DATA STRUCTURE AND METHOD FOR INTEGRATING BROADCAST TELEVISION WITH WEB PAGES

Described are a method and apparatus for incorporating broadcast television into Web pages. Broadcast television can be embedded into Web pages using, for example, a “tv:” attribute in conjunction with common HTML tags. Within the “tv:” attribute, a Web-page author can reference a TV station by channel number, network, or broadcast call letters. HTML documents are parsed to recover both the conventional tags and tags that include TV attributes. The resulting Web pages display the identified broadcast TV in a frame specified by the TV attribute. One embodiment supports the presentation of television in the background of an HTML document. In that embodiment, HTML tags corresponding to overlying HTML content are provided with an attribute that defines a level of transparency from zero to one-hundred percent. The transparency attribute allows content providers to overlay any type of HTML information over a broadcast television show without completely obscuring the underlying show. This aspect of the invention employs a z attribute that can be used to specify the relative position of broadcast television and overlying HTML content.