Re: some points w.r.t. streaming and buffering scenarios

Johnb@screen.subtitling.com wrote...

> SMIL is not exactly well-understood, nor does it have **wide** support
> in authoring tools, languages and OS vendors, etc. either. :-)

Well, Windows and Mac OS X support SMIL out of the box.  That's pretty
good.  RealNetworks is first with SMIL 2.0 support.  It's pretty popular
too.  And although you don't need an authoring tool to author SMIL,
there are many, many XML and SMIL authoring tools available.

> I'm not against using XML per se, but have to agree with Al that if it
> gets in the way..... My concern with XML is that it is a single hierarchy
> of nesting.

I think you're confusing XML with some XML applications you may have seen.
 Can you elaborate?

> IMHO this requires that the text, authors suggested presentation style and
> timing elements are all 'separate' from each other.

Proposal 0.0 separates content from presentation.  Can you describe the
problem you're trying to solve so that I can show you how it might work?

> Secondly - SMIL and XML are heavyweights - both result in very large files
> to do relatively small things.

Are you familiar with HTML?   :^)   Seriously, (1) this is basically a myth
(modems compress text content exceptionally well), (2) HTTP 1.1 supports
compression on top of that, and (3) since it's based on XML, standards
under way for XML compression will work with TT as well.

-- Charles Wiltgen
   <http://playbacktime.com/>

Received on Tuesday, 11 February 2003 00:11:40 UTC