Re: Negative percentages for ACSS pause properties

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At 03:16 PM 04/08/97 -0700, T. V. Raman wrote:
>negative pauses could for instance be used in a software
>synthesis environment to superimpose multiple channels of apeech and
>non-speech auditory output.
>Of course, care needs to be taken in how one uses it--
>e.g. specifying that the star spangled banner be played at time t - 
100mss
>as the start event for a document abstract  may be appropriate, but 
saying
>that it start 1000s before the abstract is spoken is probably silly.

If negative pauses are permitted, the definition of time units should be 
changed to allow negative values.  (ACSS can be a genuine time machine! 
:))  However, I wonder about the requirements this would have on 
implementors.  If a UA is to handle negative pauses of any amount, it must 
process the entire document before rendering any of it.  While specifying -
1000s is silly, UAs will need to be aware of some kind of minimum value (-
5s?) to allow rendering while the document is loaded.

If ACSS allows negative pauses, I think it should give a suggested minimum 
that UAs should consider, or (probably better) specify that UAs can 
arbitrarily set negative pauses to any larger amount up to zero.  With the 
latter option, UAs could set their own threshold (perhaps based on the 
amount of buffering the UA does), and could change extremely small values 
like -1000s to something more reasonable, like -5s or 0.

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Liam Quinn
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Received on Monday, 4 August 1997 18:38:53 UTC