Re: Why SMIL technology will prevail over competing methods?

Avaro Olivier wrote:
> 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 ?

	I myself am a bit torn on the situation.  The people who really excell
at HTML design are typically not using WYSIWYG editors, as they say it
takes some of the control of format away from them.  I somewhat agree
with this hypothesis.  As a result of this feeling, having the view
source function is kind of nice to learn the tricks other people are
using.
	However, I am also a professional and I make a living doing this.  I
would prefer that people did not have access to some of my source code. 
I realize that at this time there's not going to be much they could
steal, but it still makes me a touch nervous.
	And on the third hand, without the view source you can't check it to
see what it's doing to you.  If they were to point you to some place
that you didn't want to be, there'd be no way to find out until it did
it.  (Not that I check this often, but I have checked it on occasion)

	Does anyone know if there are already plans and/or definitions for how
Java/JavaScript/VBScript are going to fit into this?  The SMIL language
is a very nice idea, but I see in the documentation that it is intended
for applications.  It doesn't seem to me that it will handle
applications without some kind of programming language, and I would hope
that it would be one of the already established standards (and my
preferences are in the same order that they are listed above).

Received on Monday, 22 June 1998 14:50:24 UTC