Re: Why SMIL technology will prevail over competing methods?

Hi guys,

Let me jump in :

> While we are talking pros and cons...
> 
> SMIL's text format is a big advantage. Text is friendly and understandable.
> It feels a lot like HTML. But what made HTML really take off is that people
> could source the HTML with the browsers.

1. Once the standard really take off and people make serious content,
how many will really use the text source ? It seems to me that yes,
having a text format is an advantage, but probably not as much as there
seems to be an agreement on this list. People will use SMIL editors and
will want to forget about the text encoding format as soon as possible.
Comments ?

2. The list of competitors mainly consist in existing products that,
kludge by kludge are solving part of the problem. It seems to me that a
standard should rather provide solutions to its customers (people making
products, contents, ...) than competing with them.

3. In the list of "competitors", MPEG-4 seems to be completly ignored by
this community. For your information you can have a look at
http://garuda.imag.fr/MPEG4. Though, stating the problem as a
"competition" is probably not the best way to go if we want some day to
allow multimedia to become a reality. My approach would rather be "Give
peace a chance" ;-) rather than frontal competition between an ISO and a
W3C standards, that will lead us who knows where ...

Kind regards,

Olivier

Received on Sunday, 21 June 1998 13:23:04 UTC