Re: Caption synchronization tolerance

At 07:29 AM 8/24/01 -0400, geoff freed wrote:
>within a tolerance of X

Geoff has made it clear that "X" stands more for "the unknown" than some 
fixed number and that's echoed by Joe's very elucidating examples of what 
*really* goes into captioning (including especially "video description") in 
this highly creative medium.

What this underlines is the extreme importance of user control. Those of us 
equipped with retinae are familiar with the ability to ignore such things 
as banner ads (I could read an entire New Yorker and not be able to tell 
you the name of one advertised product) and even "intrusive" sounds, but 
unless the means of controlling all the materials now endemic to the Web is 
owned by the user we will have failed our friends/clients.

I think that some of the checkpoints are "too specific" and thereby might 
weaken the fundamental message, e.g. 2.3, 2.4, and 2.6 deal with particular 
instances requiring user control and could be misinterpreted as the *only* 
situations in which this is important. They might better be in a set of 
"necessary but not sufficient" examples of *some* of the areas demanding 
user disposition of authors' propositions.

One enemy is "final form" postings that freeze 
content/presentation/structure in a way that precludes important 
modifications by the user. Another is absence of a "default" presentation 
for those who'd rather not be bothered with all those choices! There is 
still a tendency to mistake the need for the latter as an excuse for the 
former.

--
Love.
EACH UN-INDEXED/ANNOTATED WEB POSTING WE MAKE IS TESTAMENT TO OUR HYPOCRISY

Received on Friday, 24 August 2001 08:31:29 UTC