Re: Why SMIL technology will prevail over competing methods?

At 10:52 AM 6/22/98 -0800, Cliff Anderson wrote:
>Avaro Olivier wrote:
>> 1. Once the standard really take off and people make serious content,
>> how many will really use the text source ? It seems to me that yes,
>> having a text format is an advantage, but probably not as much as there
>> seems to be an agreement on this list. People will use SMIL editors and
>> will want to forget about the text encoding format as soon as possible.
>> Comments ?
>
>	I myself am a bit torn on the situation.  The people who really excell
>at HTML design are typically not using WYSIWYG editors, as they say it
>takes some of the control of format away from them.  I somewhat agree
>with this hypothesis.  As a result of this feeling, having the view
>source function is kind of nice to learn the tricks other people are
>using.

I also agree with this.  Early on, many HTML editors had a difficult time
competing with Notepad.  Furthermore, in something as complex as HTML is
today (with JavaScript or whateverScript), there's virtually no way that a
tool can harness all of the power of the language.  What's more, one of the
coolest parts about HTML (and hopefully SMIL) is that there's a ton of
great server-side scripting languages (Perl, Python, Tk, C, Java, you name
it) that have really powerful text manipulation capabilities, and thus can
deal with HTML or SMIL really effectively.

>	However, I am also a professional and I make a living doing this.  I
>would prefer that people did not have access to some of my source code. 
>I realize that at this time there's not going to be much they could
>steal, but it still makes me a touch nervous.

One of the interesting parts of RealSystem G2 is that we have the
capability of streaming this over RTSP, which makes it a little more
difficult to view the source if that is your goal.  Ultimately, the problem
with *any* system is that if the audience can view it, they can copy it.

A text-based format does make "surf-and-steal" a little easier, and we're
working on ways of mitigating this if you are interested in protecting your
intellectual property, while letting people who don't mind sharing to
share.  We'd be interested in your thoughts on this.

>	And on the third hand, without the view source you can't check it to
>see what it's doing to you.  If they were to point you to some place
>that you didn't want to be, there'd be no way to find out until it did
>it.  (Not that I check this often, but I have checked it on occasion)

Once again, we're interested in your thoughts on this.  Ya can't have it
both ways (*I* get to "view source", but no one else gets to)  :)

>	Does anyone know if there are already plans and/or definitions for how
>Java/JavaScript/VBScript are going to fit into this?  The SMIL language
>is a very nice idea, but I see in the documentation that it is intended
>for applications.  It doesn't seem to me that it will handle
>applications without some kind of programming language, and I would hope
>that it would be one of the already established standards (and my
>preferences are in the same order that they are listed above).

I'm sure there are lots of W3C members and staff lurking on this list
trying to decide what's needed.  The Preview Release of RealSystem G2 gives
you a taste for the sorts of HTML/SMIL integration that's possible, which
lets you leverage the Java/JavaScript/VBScript capabilities of the browser
while using the synchronization capabilities of RealSystem/SMIL.  If you
get a chance, play around with this stuff.  I don't have any good demos to
point you at now, but we're always at work on these things, and so look for
something in the not too distant future.

All this said, I don't see SMIL as "competing", so, since the subject line
seems to imply that, I'd better put the standard disclaimer here.  I think
that MPEG4 is interesting in its own right, and a SMIL/MPEG4 combination
could be very powerful.

Rob

---
Rob Lanphier (robla@real.com)    Voice: (206)674-2322   Fax: (206)674-2699
RTSP: http://www.real.com/rtsp   SMIL: http://www.real.com/technology/smil

Received on Monday, 22 June 1998 15:40:20 UTC