Re: No smile for SMIL

> The utility of SMIL is diminshed greatly by the fact that it does not
> have a standard method for inline representations of audio, video, and
> images.  There should have been an attribute "mime_type" and an
> attribute "local", this way the XML instance could have carried the
> entire data set instead of having to create a new connection and
> download yet another set of data.

HTML has become a success without coding images or video inline.  Why
would this be different for SMIL?  Http 1.1 allows you to get the
document, parse the doc while keeping the connection open, download all
media items in one single connection, and finally close the connection. 
Additionally, a large amount of applications will need to make use of
streaming protocols such as RTSP to fetch the actual media content. Note
that generally, you cannot start playing a SMIL document until you have
parsed the document completely. Inlining a large video will drastically
delay the moment the document can be started.

However, inline encoding can indeed be useful for some applications,
and  it may be included in future versions of SMIL.  And as this problem
will also apply to other file formats based on XML, I think a general
XML solution would be preferable.  I already heard some rumors about an
XML archive format, comparable to JAR.

Regards, Jacco

Received on Wednesday, 17 June 1998 12:02:18 UTC