A profile for TV

Hi all,
I believe is time to start to consolidate the experience we are gathering
during our conversation in this IG. One way to achieve this could be to  
work together on a "Profile for TV".

As we discussed during our last F2F in Hollywood (notes available at [1]),
there are different meaning that people usually associate to the word  
"profile" and for sure we will have to address this as a first step of our  
work and set out clear expectations.

With this email I would like to ask IG members:

1) if they are interested to work on such a profile
2) what are your expectations for such a document.

about 1),to express you interest please send a reply to this mail to the
list or privately to me. If there is enough support we will start a new TF
working on this.

about 2), I'll list below my expectations, feel free to do the same in
reply to this mail, adding your expectations or commenting on mine


My expectations:

* The range of technologies available for web applications is so wide that  
an implementers necessarily need to make a choice on what to implement and  
when.

While in some ecosystems is fine to leave to each implementer to choose  
his own roadmap, in other ecosystems there is a need for coordination in  
order to harmonize the development cycle of the different stakeholders (CE  
manufacturers, Content providers, Content Authors, etc.) and provide a  
good user experience.

A profile can then also help on this aspect.

* The HTML5 spec, in some places, defers to other specs the role of  
defining
how a feature would be mapped on other layers of the media stack.
For example, for in-band tracks you can read
"Set the new text track's kind, label, and language based on the semantics
of the relevant data, as defined by the relevant specification."

While this is perfectly fine in the HTML5 scope, is clear that a mapping
document (the "relevant specification") needs to be defined by someone
depending on the infrastructure they are using. This discussion is
currently going on in the Media Pipeline Task Force, but we eventually
need to write down this mapping spec (as already suggested by Clarke at  
TPAC).

There are other areas where a similar work is needed (e.g. exposing  
metadata)

A TV profile could serve this purpose as well.

* Task Forces of the IG are trying to identify gaps in web technologies.
Sometimes the outcome of the discussion is just that there is already a
way to cover a use case with existing technologies. If this outcome is not
documented somewhere, though, there is a risk that other people will have
the same discussion again. Would be than good to document how certain use
cases, relevant for the TV industry, can be covered with existing
technologies.

A TV profile can help to document this.

* There are some identified gaps which are being addressed by work in one
or more W3C WGs. Is good to document this activity so that people
looking for that know where to find it.

This can also be documented in a profile.



[1] http://www.w3.org/2011/09/21-22-webtv-f2f-minutes.html#day1-am2
[2] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/introduction.html#scope
[3]  
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/media-elements.html#sourcing-in-band-text-tracks

-- 
Giuseppe Pascale
TV & Connected Devices
Opera Software

Received on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 12:02:13 UTC