RE: A profile for TV

Hi Mark,

I generally agree to have a clear definition/boundary of HTML terminology
for TV experience would be very beneficial to entire industry.
In doing this, several things need to be considered that profiling is a
little bit above scope of technical standard activities and rather close to
business model of stake holders, also as Mark mentioned in the previous
mail, it depends onto physical device's capabilities in the projected time
frame. The device today will be far poorer than next year device.

Moreover, for helping implementer's develop program without confusion, this
work should do more than simply choosing which tags, attributes are used
but also suggest values of attributes/properties such as default, min and
max.

Besides technical aspects, when to finish profiling is very important in a
product life cycle. As everybody is aware, most TV manufacturers started
HTML based smart TV business already. If this work is done in early this
year, this would be great. But I'm afraid it's a little bit late to have TV
profiling in wide place like W3C. W3C scale profiling would be too general
and far behind from actual business. As of now, my frank opinion is that a
few very tightly coupled companies profiling would be meaningful to the
business. If we really want to have a profile in W3C. the progress of this
work needs to be light speed.

For your reference, CE did HTML4 profiling in CEA several years ago. Result
of that is CE-HTML in CEA-2014 document. Several TV makers are now
discussing to have SmartTV-HTML based on HTML5/HTML4.

Best regards,
HJ / LG Electronics

-----Original Message-----
From: Vickers, Mark [mailto:Mark_Vickers@cable.comcast.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 12:52 PM
To: Giuseppe Pascale
Cc: <public-web-and-tv@w3.org>
Subject: Re: A profile for TV

Thanks for sending this out, Giuseppe. I would like to work on this effort.

I agree that we need to first discuss which meaning(s) of "profile" we wish
to develop.

Here are two contrasting kinds of profiles to help understand the issues:

- Superset Profile
The HTML5 spec leaves many features optional that are important for
interoperability (e.g. choice of XHTML and/or HTML, JavaScript, CSS, image
types, media types, etc.) A Superset Profile would define, for example,
that a range of devices would all support the full HTML5 spec, and
additional provide requirements for many of the optional HTML5 features
above. Every HTML5 browser makes decisions on optional features - the
Superset Profile would just publish such decisions in a product-independent
manner. This would increase interoperability amongst this set of devices
and still be fully HTML5 compatible. Content written for the Superset
Profile may not run on all HTML5-compliant browsers (if the content depends
on optional features), but the Superset Profile would run all HTML5-
compatible content.

- Subset Profile
There has been discussion at previous Web&TV Workshops that the full HTML5
spec is too expensive for some consumer devices. A Subset Profile would
define, for example, a subset of HTML5 that uses fewer resources than the
full spec. Content written for a Subset Profile would run on any HTML5
browser, but the Subset Profile device would not run all HTML5-compatible
content.

There are a number of external organizations, particularly in the TV space,
which have created HTML specifications which are Supersets, Subsets or
both. Often, these external specs become obsolete when the W3C improves
specifications, such as with HTML5, since the W3C has little or no
knowledge of these external specs. Defining a TV Profile within W3C could
provide a common profile spec for these external groups to reference. This
would more closely align the external organizations with W3C and with each
other. The W3C could also move these profiles forward on a regular basis to
avoid obsolescence.

Thanks,
mav


On Dec 13, 2011, at 4:01 AM, Giuseppe Pascale wrote:

> 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 Wednesday, 14 December 2011 05:32:22 UTC