Minutes - 03/20/03 Telecon

Minutes of TT WG Telconference on 03/20/2003

Present:

  Dave Singer [DS]
  Brad Bodkin [BB]
  Thierry Michel [TM]
  Markus Gylling [MG scribe]
  Erik Hodge [EH]

Regrets

Absent

  Glenn Adams
  Mike Dolan
  Patrick Schmitz
  Geoff Freed
  Gerry Field

[BB] reports on stylistic markup walkthrough: still ongoing work.
I'm going through each attribute on the GF list trying to cross-map
with attributes listed (or not) on the F2F minutes from CSS, SVG,
XFS-FO.  I'm (just about) down the third column, with XFS-FO still to
do. Sorry it's taking me so long, I've got to come up to speed on all
these specs as I'm not familiar with them specifically.

As I've been doing this, I've been trying to imagine a simple timed
text document which describes the most simplistic RealText or QTtext
file, so that I can convince myself that this will be fruitful.  What
I find is that, while we **could** design markup with is some
combination of all these existing specs, it would likely result in a
rather obtuse way to do simple things.  Why are we trying to reuse
existing specs which are designed for other purposes, when we're
trying to design a caption description/annotation markup for
interchange?  Interchange on timed text information should have
markup that's very specific to captioning, subtitling, etc., and not
overburdened with all the SVG and other semantics, which while useful
in a general layup sense, are like picking up a dime with a
steamshovel for the purposes of exchanging timed text information.
Furthermore, implementation of a parser/player that uses such a
combined markup will be a very difficult thing to do.  And while we
can divorce ourselves from user agent stuff, we do so at the peril of
creating an ultimately unused specification.

Just my thoughts. I'm continuing on my action item.

[MG] Agrees. This layered approach to styling will endup to be
burdensome for implementors.

[EH] I mentioned the two implementation rule earlier. We are only
describing the format. But there are benefits to also adress
implementations. We found this with SMIL2.

[BB] Also complicated for simple authoring scenarios. How to combine
extensibility with simplicity??

[BB] Cant find rgba in SVG. Still looking for transparency markup.

[DS] Is the group ok with Van der Meer and me being a liason contact
between MPEG and TT? All: yes.

Adjourn 18:30 CET

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2003 09:23:42 UTC