Re: Fwd: Re: Timed Text work

Yes, I agree that it would be a mistake to invent new things if we can use
existing modules of well-known languages. This work does seem very close to
producing modularisations of HTML and SMIL combined.

One of the use cases that might be important (it probably is for styling
purposes, I don't know how semantically important it is beyond that) is teh
ability to identify a particular speaker ("Fred", "Narration", "description",
...).

If each speaker were encoded as a seperate SMIL sequence, and they were run
in paralell, then this should be easy. Style effects such as distinguishing
audio synthesis or font characteristics, positioning (e.g. cartoon speech
bubbles) can be readily attached to items within a SMIL sequence. Who said
what can be extracted by seperating the sequences.

(this doesn't make it beautiful to write, but it should be relatively easy to
provide a transform format that was simple time ordered, with speaker
identification on each fragment, and then seperate those into seperate
tracks, for those who insist on hand authoring. In an authoring tool it
should be trivial to have a multi-track interface - audio tools do this a
lot.

cheers

Chaals

On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Ivan Herman wrote:

  > > Thanks. My personal feeling is that XHTMLBasic + SMIL should do it (SMIL
  > > has some positioning facilities, too), but we can leave that to the WG.
  > >
  > > Not that I want to get on anybody's nerve, but I still go on nagging... My
  > > reaction is purely (as usual) the comm team person reaction: how would I
  > > present this stuff to the public? Not only should we try to reuse existing
  > > modules, but we should also try to avoid adding too much to the acronym
  > > soup if we can avoid. If we spend a lot of time to the general public to
  > > explain what SMIL and XHTML are, let use those combinations explicitly,
  > > rather than having TT... Also, wouldn't it be clearer to have a slightly
  > > more general charter for a WG and let that one finalize the XHTML+SMIL
  > > module, too? The similarities are really too close...

Received on Wednesday, 16 January 2002 07:33:47 UTC