cool idea: SMIL player helpers

Just had a discussion with a colleage about the difficulty
of making sure that SMIL presentations play back on a wide
range of SMIL players, rather than only on one
particular implementation.

He proposed to use helper applications for SMIL players,
similar to what made integrating new media formats into
HTML easy in the early days (and in some cases still today).

Here's how this would work (coming from a Unix background):

- To add a helper to for a media type that is not supported by
a particular player, the user adds the MIME type and the 
application to call to a MIME configuration file (this should
probably be specific to the SMIL player rather than the
general MIME configuration file used by the browser and
the mail reader)

- If the player cannot play back a particular media type,
it sends it to the helper instead.

This provides a good solution at least for audio - if you
can't play RealAudio, open up a RealAudio helper.

It is a bit more difficult for visual media types, since 
the SMIL file typically also contains layout information.
A possibility to resolve this is to do the layout as
described, and put some information like "see helper
for media object" into the space reserved for the layout -
similar to the broken images/unloaded images in html.

This would make sure that people have access to the full
information on all SMIL players, even though the presentation
may not look as "nice". Installation of helpers 
and thus which media types can be played back is under the control
of the user. I think there is enough evidence 
from early days in HTML that this is a good way to bootstrap 
usage.

Thoughts ?

-Philipp Hoschka, W3C

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   Philipp Hoschka                  |
   http://www.w3.org/people/hoschka |
				    |   World Wide Web Consortium
				    |   MIT-LCS
   ph@w3.org                        |   545, Technology Square
   Tel:(+1) 617.258.0604            |   Cambridge, MA 02139
   Fax:(+1) 617.258.5999            |   USA
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Received on Wednesday, 16 September 1998 11:30:14 UTC