Re: Synchronized Multimedia homepage content

Hey Professor Bulterman,

Thanks for the speedy reply.  I would be more than happy to relay my
frustrations and some suggestions.

Firstly the homepage has very little explanatory text on it, and is failing
as a control structure for linking to other pages with explanatory text,
because of the variety of dead links and redirects.  My wishlist for the
SMIL homepage would include some of the basic facts such as:

   - the current state of the standard
   - how the current standard relates to previous versions of the standard
   (and the validity of older SMIL documents w/ regard to the current
   standard)
   - better partitioning of examples and explanatory pages according to the
   version of the standard they reference
   - Sections for people looking to author smil content vs people intending
   to implement SMIL user agents

>From the perspective of someone intending to implement/verify a user agent,
there is certainly a dearth of tools, or introductions to using or verifying
SMIL.  Finding tools to validate XML1.1 is an extremely non-trivial task
(partially because googling for for the term xml1.1 is utterly futile).
 There do not appear to be any tools online for validating xml1.1 documents
(perhaps this is my own lack of knowledge regarding 1.1), and certainly
there are no services to check a SMIL document against a particular SMIL
profile (or set of profiles).

This lack of end user tools requires anyone intending to author SMIL
documents to either have a SMIL player that they're testing against, or to
have the expertise of a User-agent implementor.

Similarly getting a SMIL demo running is a non-trivial task.  The provided
list of players does not indicate which versions of SMIL each player
supports.  Once you identify Ambulant as the only SMIL3 player, one has to
download and install it, and then find the demos, and identify which of the
demos are SMIL3 vs SMIL2.

Some of this knowledge gap is filled by your (Professor Bulterman) SMIL3
book, which i have sitting next to me at this very moment, but unfortunately
that doesn't really help others viewing the SMIL homepage! :)

In the end, the page should be able to answer, or direct users to the
answers of several questions:

   - What is SMIL? (and what is the current version?)
   - How do i play a SMIL document?
   - How do i create a SMIL document?
   - How do i create a SMIL user agent?
   - Who else can i talk to about SMIL?
   - Who else is using SMIL?

There is a lot of room to produce complimentary tools and information to the
standard which would greatly help boost understanding and use of the
standard.  For instance, i threw together a graph of the SMIL3 module
dependencies over the weekend (
http://img.skitch.com/20100104-t5bsh5xecxg84d3mt5tmn4c3b.jpg ).  I'd like to
build another graph for the SMIL profiles listed in the standard.
 Additionally I'm interested in building a SMIL validator that validates
documents against particular profiles.

SMIL is (necessarily) complicated, and i think that it's a very daunting
task for the uninitiated to try and get a toehold into the standard.  The
result seems to be that there is a lot of casual knowledge of what SMIL is
supposed to be, and very little compliance with (or understanding of) the
standard.  This in turn leads to more confusion as to which tools support
what, and how that interacts with changes to the standard.

Cheers,

-Ted Han

(P.S. your book website has several dead links too Professor Bulterman!  The
SMIL Interop Tests just links to the SMIL homepage, the GRINS links is of
course missing w/ the rest of oratrix, and the SMIL Authoring Tools links
are both dead.  Still enjoying the book though!)

P.P.S.  Again, i am more than willing to lend whatever help i can supply.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Dick Bulterman <Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for the notes on the SMIL home page. Putting together a more
> comprehensive and inviting page is at (or near) the top of my to-do list for
> the beginning of 2010. I'm happy to take suggestions from the community
> (including suggestions to help and to review new pages). This change is a
> long time in coming, but will happen this month.
>
> regards,
> Dick Bulterman
> co-chair, SYMM
>