RE: temporal URI fragments

Your long message seems to mainly focus on the argument
about why _some_ standard is needed, but I'm not sure
you've addressed the objections raised about _this particular_
formulation.

I have no trouble with individual media types
defining temporal fragments. I think it would even
be interesting to consider whether we might establish
a policy (BCP) that audio/* and video/* media types
should adopt such a temporal fragment. And I would
imagine that one could point out that some protocols
(and thus URI schemes) might have specific support
for temporal fragments, while others (http, ftp, smb, nfs)
might only support byte range (or offset) retrieval,
leaving it up to the client to interpret the temporal
fragments.

But I don't think you can assume that these fragments
can be implemented in general, without any other
caveats, and get the expected behavior.

I'm also dismayed by the complexity of all of the
different smtpe time codes, which seems to make
an unnecessary dependence on another complex
external standard.  RTSP (rfc 2326) section 3.6
seems to get by with a very simple time start
and offset. 

Since the most widely used URI schemes will
be 'rtsp', 'http' and (probably 'file'), and there's
some question about the implementability of your
proposal, perhaps you could point to some experience
with an implementation of this specification?

Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Sunday, 8 June 2003 13:56:33 UTC