Re: gzip SMIL 3.0 content

On  5-Jan-2007, at 20:14 , Jose Ramirez wrote:
> All in an effort to make SMIL the standard in multimedia on the  
> Web. SMIL presentations being made up of separate files, on a slow  
> connection the files
> may not arrive at a certain time, making the presentation  
> ineffective. If SMIL 3.0 would add gzip, all the files could be  
> bundled and compressed, allowing
> small presentations on slow connections to viewed as intended. It's  
> going to be a while before everyone has a fast connection
> to the Web. This will help establish SMIL, by giving the option to  
> anyone with access to an http server, they can serve the content  
> with prefetch and caching or gzip it. One way or the other the  
> content would appear the same as it does locally.

I think gzipping is only part of the solution: it may also be needed  
to aggregate additional media items (audio, images). The SVG document  
you referred to talks only about compression (at least, that's all I  
saw, I wasn't aware of this before). But the mobile phone MMS  
standard shows a possible solution: pack the smil file plus the  
accompanying media items into a Mime/multipart message, and come up  
with a naming scheme to refer to the other multipart parts from  
within the SMIL.

Putting on my SYMM WG member hat:
1. This should probably go into a new profile, as nothing really  
changes in the language.
2. Someone writing up a proposal and submitting it to the SYMM group  
would definitely help, going from one paragraph with what seems like  
a good idea to a standards document requires a lot of details to be  
fleshed out. Not only in writing the standards text but before that a  
lot of details have to be thought about. (not only the media  
references, already mentioned above, but also things like whether  
things should be structured so that the presentation has to be the  
first item so it can start before all additional items have arrived,  
and lots of other things).
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma  
Goldman