RE: HTML and Multimedia Synchronization

Silvia,
 
I have implemented mathematics documents, document pages and portions of digital mathematics books and textbooks, including based upon pages and portions of existing documents, AMS documents, math books, and textbooks, including while looking at specific features and features in combination, for example CSS columns and MathML3 line wrapping (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/KCIMqFwVaIY/bkIfgjPERo0J).

On the topic of scholarly and scientific communication, an interesting use case is mathematics documents with device-specific formatting (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/), for example columnization (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/) and widescreen displays, that print styled as per AMS document style (ftp://ftp.ams.org/pub/author-info/documentation/handbk.pdf).

I participate in some discussion groups specifically interested in digital STEM books and textbooks and, more specifically, digital mathematics books and textbooks; I could collect together their observations and invite them and other participants here to provide feedback upcoming; a digital textbook team indicated to me, for example, an interest in the speech recognition of mathematics.  Some more topics will be available upcoming with some available on the 15th when papers from the upcoming W3C digital publishing workshop will be available online.

Some HTML and multimedia synchronization techniques are possible with with HTML, XHTML, and JavaScript.  We can observe the timesheets.js project (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/), for example, with internal timesheets (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/markup/intTimesheet.xhtml), external timesheets (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/markup/extTimesheet.html), smil-* attributes (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/markup/smilPrefix.html), data-* attributes (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/markup/dataPrefix.html), smil:* attributes (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/markup/smilNS.xhtml), and inline SMIL (http://wam.inrialpes.fr/timesheets/markup/noPrefix.html).

Enhancing the Web-based and desktop-based indexing, searching, and retrieving of RDFa-enhanced hypertext-based time-based multimedia documents or configurations of such documents, or bookmarks, can become topical.  Standardizing HTML and multimedia synchronization, for example with HTML 5.1, a new HTML+SMIL document (http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-smil-boston-20000622/html-smil-profile.html), and/or a SMIL 4 specification, can enhance the indexing, searching and retrieving of, the searchability of, content with multimedia synchronization features.  Some topics in multimedia synchronization include speech synthesis and 3D graphics.

EPUB Media Overlays 3.0 (http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-mediaoverlays.html) describes multimedia synchronization, specifically media overlays, with regard to the EPUB3 format.



Kind regards,

Adam