Re: farewell

I was glad when Dick joined the Task Force, as I felt that SMIL was being
dismissed without fair consideration. Like Geoff, I've worked with Dick in
other groups, and respect his opinion and expertise. In spite of the sound
points (with which I strongly agree) made by Dick in his untimely farewell,
it appears it just doesn't fit the implementation path this subgroup seems
determined to follow.

mark

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Geoff Freed <geoff_freed@wgbh.org> wrote:

>
>
> Having worked with Dick in other W3C working groups, I can say that his
> knowledge of SMIL, synchronized multimedia and accessibility are matched by
> few.  For anyone to feel driven out of a working group is a serious matter,
> but for someone of his stature to leave because of hostilities is something
> that speaks loudly, I hope, to the chairs of this group as well as to the
> leaders of the larger HTML5 working group.  The loss of Dick's knowledge and
> experience cannot be overstated, and his reasons for leaving are both
> angering and disappointing.
>
> Geoff/WGBH
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: public-html-a11y-request@w3.org [public-html-a11y-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Dick Bulterman [Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl]
> Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 6:12 PM
> To: HTML Accessibility Task Force
> Subject: farewell
>
> After last week's media subgroup phone call (and especially in light of
> Silvia's rather direct personal attacks on me), I've decided that my
> further participation in this group would not be productive. While I am,
> of course, pleased to not to have been accused of harboring weapons of
> mass destruction (although this could come next), it is clear that
> Silvia feels that I've been wasting the group's time without producing
> any constructive feedback. While this posturing may be par for the
> course in HTML5 circles, it is not the way of resolving differences of
> insight to which I've become accustomed in my 15 years of participation
> in W3C working groups. I gladly yield my position to the new generation
> of cowboys (and cowgirls) in the field.
>
> Here are a few closing suggestions regarding Silvia's proposal for
> temporal composition and content control for captions support.
>
> 1. The name 'track' for identifying a text object within a video element
> is misleading. It may lead people to think that any arbitrary data type
> could be specified (such as an audio track, an animation track or even a
> secondary video track). Since this proposal is purportedly intended to
> allow the activation of external text tracks only, a more reasonable
> name would be 'textTrack' or 'textStream'.
>
> 2. The name 'trackGroup' is equally misleading. In other languages, a
> 'group' element is used as to aggregate child elements; here, it is used
> to select child elements. As with 'track' it also gives the impression
> that a choice can be made within a select of general tracks, which is
> not true. A name such as 'textSelect' or 'captionSelect' might be more
> useful. (The 'switch' would only be appropriate if all semantics of the
> SMIL switch were adapted.)
>
> 3. The semantics defined by Silvia for managing selection based on
> lexical ordering is not clear to me. It seems that the children are
> first processed to resolve 'source' elements, then 'track' elements (and
> then trackGroups)? What happens when things appear out of order (such as
>  having 'source' elements interspersed among track elements?
>
> 4. The assumption that there are no synchronization conflicts between a
> video master and the text children strikes me as overly simplistic: it
> is not practical to simply buffer a full set of captions in all cases.
> Consider mobile phone use: if a given video had captions in
> French/Dutch/English, would all three sets be downloaded before the
> first video frame is displayed? What happens if someone turns on
> captions while the video is active: does the video pause while the
> captions are loaded? It the SRT files are large, significant data
> charges could be incurred, even if the video itself were not played.
>
> I continue to be concerned that overloading text selection and temporal
> alignment within the <video>/<audio> elements is, architecturally, a bad
> idea. By adding explicit temporal structuring (as is already done in
> HTML+Time and in scores of playlist formats), the syntax for selecting
> and integrating text captions would not have to be a special-purpose
> hack. An example (based on HTML+Time syntax available within IE for over
> 10 years) is:
>    <div timeContainer="par" controls ... >
>      <video ...>
>        <source .../>
>        ...
>        <source .../>
>      </video>
>      <switch systemCaptions="true">
>        <textstream src="xxx" systemLanguage="nl" ... />
>        <textstream src="yyy" systemLanguage="fr" ... />
>        <textstream src="zzz" ... /> <!-- default -->
>      </switch>
>    </div>
>
> There is nothing complex about these solutions -- it simply means making
> temporal synchronization explicit. It allows easy extensibility for
> including image slideshows as alternatives to video, or for providing
> different choice in the case of particular screen sizes or connection
> speeds. Naturally, this is not an accessibility-only issue, but history
> has shown that the community of users with special needs are best served
> when a consistent framework exists for managing multiple content
> alternatives.
>
> I first wrote a position paper on this (with concrete suggestions) four
> years ago and submitted it to the HTML lists, but it never got on the
> HTML5 agenda. Since then, I've been told several times that there is no
> time to come up with an appropriate solution for developing a
> compressive model for inter-object synchronization before HTML5 goes to
> last call. (I've been hearing this for about 2 years.) Yet, there is
> time to come up with non-extensible, non-scalable solutions.  There is
> even time to develop yet another timed text model. In this light, I
> think that it is indefensible to ignore structured time within HTML5.
>
> But this is simply my opinion. I realize that it is especially
> appropriate within this group to note that there are none so blind as
> those who will not see (and none so deaf as those who will not hear). I
> will charitably assume that I am one who is blind and deaf, and blocking
> progress to boot. For this reason, my departure is as productive as it
> is timely.
>
> I wish you all well in the process of wrapping up this important work.
>
> Kind regards,
> Dick Bulterman
>
>
>