- From: Glenn A. Adams <glenn@xfsi.com>
- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 21:18:06 -0500
- To: <public-tt@w3.org>
-----Original Message----- From: Bert Bos [mailto:bert@w3.org] Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 11:50 AM To: www-tt-tf@w3.org Subject: Some comments on the requirements The timed-text requirements document is old and probably no longer up to date anyway (requirements have a tendency to age very quickly), but I thought I would send some comments anyway. They should still be in time for the first working draft... I Architecture 2 Have a valid XML representation Apart from the fact that this contradicts the first requirement ("simple and easy"), I think that limiting the syntax up front is not very useful. Especially so, because of the timed-text formats (and proposed formats) that I have seen so far, those that were not based on XML were by far the most elegant. (E.g, those of Quicktime and Mplayer.) 8 Allow the language of the text to be identified using xml:lang A corollary of the previous comment. The language should indeed be identified somehow, but it could be by other means than XML. Indeed, it could be outside the document itself, e.g., in an HTTP header. 11 Have a default UNICODE font Is it really a requirement to have a standard font? What font would that be? Arial? Maybe the intention was to require that the format supports all Unicode characters, rather than a specific font? 18 Allow motion [...] I think this requirements makes the format too complicated and makes it approach SMIL and SVG too much. Those formats already exist. What's needed here is something simple, as requirement 1 says. 19 Use SVG, MathML, XHTML or other language for complex font displays I agree with this requirement as such (as I said in the previous comment), but its appearance here seem to suggest something more, viz., that UAs that support timed text also have to support SVG, MathML and XHTML. That seems rather pointless to me. If the UA already supports those three, then there is no need anymore for timed text. I thought the purpose of timed text was precisely to have something that is simpler than those formats and still does the job in 95% of the cases. 22 Adopt SMIL 2.0 as a base language. Like requirement 2 ("XML"), this puts too many a priori restrictions on the format. Besides, unless you subset SMIL so much that it doesn't look like SMIL anymore, it would not be simple and easy, as required by requirement 1. 23 Be no less functional than EIA-708 [...] Interesting, but since EIA-708 is not available on-line, I don't know what this requirement means :-( II Display 12 Allow other ways to display text; for example, via text balloons. Good idea, but what exactly is required? That such other ways are not made impossible by the format? Or that the format itself contains provisions to make text balloons? I think some basic styling (font, color, justification...) should be available within the format (based on the CSS formatting model and properties catalogue, I assume), but if somebody wants text balloons, that seems to me to be a separate system, which only uses documents in the timed-text format by reference. III TIMING 4 Define text and timing markup in two separate modules in the specification. Why do the requirements talk about the format of the specification itself? Maybe it turns out that there are a handful of separable modules, but requiring that they exist seems rather unnecessary. Indeed, I think this specification will be so small that it is even not necessary to split it into chapters. I'd be tempted to add a requirement: the specification should not contain more than 10000 words... Bert -- Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/ http://www.w3.org/people/bos/ W3C/INRIA bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93 +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 21:18:07 UTC