Re: Minutes for April 21 Backplane telecon

Hi Jack -- sounds like the "strawman" implementation is the way to
go...frankly, we'll get 80% or more of the benefits from just being able to
show *how* SMIL is integrated with other technologies -- and the details of
the level of functionality will (and should be) secondary at this point.

So I'd say if you're able to execute simple sequences, dispatch some events
outside of the SMIL markup to control other elements on the page (perhaps
using the XForms dispatch action), and maybe do some simple conditionality
to select the right path inside SMIL then we're probably about there...

Note that I don't yet have a very specific use case in mind so if you do,
please let us know...and if you think the above is do-able in a reasonable
amount of work I do think it would add very appreciably to the story we can
tell...

What do others think???

Thanks, Charlie

Charles Wiecha
Manager, Multichannel Web Interaction
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
P.O. Box 704
Yorktown Heights, N.Y.  10598
Phone: (914) 784-6180, T/L 863-6180, Cell: (914) 320-2614
wiecha@us.ibm.com



                                                                                                                           
  From:       Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>                                                                             
                                                                                                                           
  To:         Charles F Wiecha/Watson/IBM@IBMUS                                                                            
                                                                                                                           
  Cc:         public-xg-app-backplane <public-xg-app-backplane@w3.org>                                                     
                                                                                                                           
  Date:       04/26/2009 04:34 PM                                                                                          
                                                                                                                           
  Subject:    Re: Minutes for April 21 Backplane telecon                                                                   
                                                                                                                           
  Sent by:    public-xg-app-backplane-request@w3.org                                                                       
                                                                                                                           






On  24-Apr-2009, at 22:49 , Charles F Wiecha wrote:


      3. we brainstormed briefly the role of SMIL in the scenario and await
      further inputs from Jack on this point. In general, the demo
      implementation would be ready to start using some SMIL Ubiquity
      implementation within a few weeks...



Things are going _very_ slow at my side. We did an Ambulant micro-release
(to get it out of the way), but it turned out to take 2 weeks in stead of
the anticipated 1 day:-( And my other main project is also demanding much
more time than anticipated, plus Fons (the other person expected to be
working on the JS SMIL implementation) has been 100% busy with writing a
paper.

So, the chances of a "real" SMIL implementation, even with only very
limited functionality, being available within a few weeks is pretty much
zero.

That raises the question of how important SMIL support within a couple of
weeks is going to be for your progress. If it's important we either have to
rig up something based on the strawman implementation I have, or have some
hand-coded javascript as a placeholder. If it's not in the critical path we
could leave it until I have something real working (which I now expect to
be not before end of june, mid july).

The strawman does have an advantage: it would allow us to experiment with
how we can connect SMIL with the other technologies, probably based on
something like relevance, without bothering too much about code quality, as
we're going to throw it away anyway. But there's a potential disadvantage
in that you might want to use all sorts of esoteric SMIL features (excl
comes to mind) that would need to be implemented in the strawman, with
probably little chance to reuse the code later.


--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman