Re: Ideas for the next draft

Hi Marisa,

I could not go through your documents yet, mainly because of W3C AB meetings and other things that required my attention in this week.
As soon as I come back to technical world, I will get in touch with you and Daniel to discuss this well.

With regards
Avneesh
From: Marisa DeMeglio 
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2020 2:58
To: W3C Synchronized Multimedia for Publications CG ; Lars Wallin ; Ivan Herman ; Avneesh Singh 
Subject: Re: Ideas for the next draft

I wonder if anyone has had a chance to look at the document I sent around about some new ideas, specifically the part about how these new concepts might look if we used a SMIL-ish syntax [1].  

I’m saying “SMIL-ish" rather than “actual SMIL”, because strictly speaking, SMIL does not cover everything that we want to do (and also, it has tons of stuff we don’t need). Waking up that WG and adding new elements is more than I’m ready for; however, borrowing some of their elements and adding enhancements seems entirely reasonable. 

I would also like to note the future of EPUB, in a new WG, which has among its deliverables Media Overlays 3.x [2].

So rather than veer off in a new format direction, what if we proposed the work of this CG as an evolution of Media Overlays? That way, there’s a coherent thread among EPUB 3, Audiobooks, and EPUB Next. 

Copying Ivan and Avneesh because I’d really like to hear their thoughts.

Thanks
Marisa 

1. https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub/blob/master/drafts/sync-narr-xml.md#notes-about-smil
2. https://w3c.github.io/epub-3-wg-charter/#deliverables


  On Jul 16, 2020, at 13:51, Marisa DeMeglio <marisa.demeglio@gmail.com> wrote:

  Hi all, 

  I’d like to present some new ideas for Synchronized Narration. This addresses several of our open issues and I believe gives us a more robust and flexible spec on which to build future iterations of our work.

  The key points are:

  1. Separate media asset declaration from in-presentation usage

  Reasons:
  * Less verbose file: don't need to redeclare file srcs every time the media asset is used.
  * Enable #2 (below)

  2. Ability to express properties on assets, e.g. custom highlight class, which can be overridden in the presentation.

  Reasons:
  * We had been looking at different ways to declare the default highlight class name. 
  * The idea outlined in the current draft is not tenable (see issue https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub/issues/21). 
  * Having default properties on assets is a more generic approach.

  3. Ensure nesting supports not only semantic structures, but also nested highlights

  Reasons:
  * Nesting has always been a requirement for us. This just refines how it works. 
  * Nested structures still possible for enabling an escape feature (to let a listener “escape” out of a complex table and back to the main content)
  * An example of a nested highlight would be to highlight a paragraph by changing its background color, and highlighting each span as it plays, by changing the text foreground color. We can now do this with nesting and properties.

  4. Consider using XML instead of JSON

  Reasons:
  * When the above changes are in place, JSON becomes unwieldy, and not at all the compact syntax we were going for.
  * Idea to provide a JS library to transform an XML document into a JSON data structure, to keep the web developers happy.

  There is a short writeup of the new ideas here [1].

  And just to remind you, here's our current draft [2], which needs updating, and issues list [3]. The proposal here would sort out many of those issues.

  Thanks to Lars Wallin at Colibrio for sharing ideas and contributing to these new drafts. Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts as we go further.

  Thanks
  Marisa

  1. https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub/blob/master/drafts/sync-narr-xml.md
  2. https://w3c.github.io/sync-media-pub/synchronized-narration.html
  3. https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub/issues