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⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
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□ Overview
1998
□ 1 □ 2 □ 3 □ 4 □ 5 □ 6 □ 7 □ 8 □ 9 □ 10 □ 11 □ 12
1999
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2003
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Issue 7: July 1998

A Story to make you SMIL

On 15 June 1998, W3C released the language SMIL (pronounced smile) as a Recommendation for synchronising multimedia on the Web. SMIL enables developers to create Web sites that are more like television without the limitations of traditional TV. At the same time, SMIL significantly lowers the bandwidth which has traditionally been necessary for transmitting multimedia content over the Internet.

The Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) has been developed over the last two years by the SYMM working group of W3C in a highly co-operative effort under the chairmanship of Philipp Hoschka of W3C. This is the story of that development to show how a W3C Working Group (WG) resolves an issue raised by the W3C membership.

For W3C, SMIL started at a Birds of a Feather session at the WWW4 Conference in Boston which went on late into the evening. This showed that there was both interest in the topic, and enthusiasm to try to solve the problem. At the WWW5 Conference in Paris, there was a tutorial on using Sound and Video on the Web which structured the issues and identified a sizeable community of interested parties. This led to a workshop at INRIA, Sophia Antipolis in October 1996 on Real Time Multimedia and the Web with 70 participants (25% came from the US, overall 53% came from industry and 47% from research organisations).

Once the interested parties were identified, W3C established the SYMM WG (March 1997) to focus on the design of a declarative language for scheduling multimedia presentations on the Web. The group included industry players such as Digital, Lucent/Bell Labs, Microsoft, Netscape, Philips, RealNetworks, The Productivity Works, and research organisations such as Columbia University, CWI, INRIA.

Several alternative approaches were initially considered by the WG, including the addition of timing information to cascading style sheets treating time as a fourth dimension in addition to the three spatial ones. However, this approach was dropped in favour of a proposal from CWI and the Esprit-funded Chameleon consortium to treat multimedia outside of the existing HTML-centred architecture. This enabled four main constructs to be the focus of development: (1) temporal synchronisation, (2) spatial layout, (3) hyperlinks from and to video and audio items, and (4) the use of alternatives for tailoring presentations to bandwidth, presentation station abilities, user's natural language, and accessibility constraints.

The WG held weekly teleconferences to interactively address issues, and used email during the week to resolve them. This resulted in a first publicly released draft of the specification in November 1997. Following a wide variety of comments and press reaction, the draft was heavily revised for the second publicly available release in February 1998.

It was agreed that no feature could be included in the final W3 Recommendation unless it had been tested on at least two implementations during interoperability tests. This is a harder condition than many working groups or standards bodies such as ISO impose, but is adopted by others such as IETF. On this occasion it focused the WG on the features which they deemed important enough to implement, without wasting too much time on interesting but less urgent ones.

The first implementation of a Netscape SMIL plug-in was made publicly available by Digital in March 1998, while CWI made the Chameleon browser available to W3C members in April 1998. The availability of browsers prior to members voting allowed the WG to experience the language and have a more informed basis for making a decision than otherwise.

After the release of the Proposed Recommendation in April 1998, the WG entered a frenzy of implementation activity to ensure that everybody's favourite feature would pass the interoperability tests and remain in the final released Recommendation. A couple of minor features remained at risk and did not make the finishing line, but nobody seemed upset, and the group seemed happy with its achievement.

Following the announcement of the Recommendation, there has been a flurry of announcements of commercially available implementations of SMIL browsers, editors and tools, centred on Real Networks commitment to the Recommendation. Since Real Networks are the leaders in the streamed video and audio market, this appears to provide a firm basis for the introduction of SMIL usage by the world.

The future of synchronised multimedia on the Web is presently under consideration by the Director of W3C, but is expected to involve closer integration with other XML tag sets being developed by W3C. W3C is holding a workshop in late June on Television and the Web to foster a better understanding of the requirements for next steps.

As to this story and the process we went through, it is intended to encourage you to submit proposals to W3C, and get involved in defining the Web's future!

Michael Wilson, Chameleon Consortium at RAL

W3C AC Meeting, Geneva

The twice yearly Advisory Committee Meeting for W3C members was held at CERN in Geneva on 24-25 June, 1998. About half the members attended. Jeff Abramatic gave a management report that included a report on the European Offices opened in the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece. He mentioned the possibility of opening further Offices in Australia and Asia.

As you know, Alan Kotok, who is Associate Manager of W3C at MIT, has been running the Technology & Society Domain since Jim Miller's move to Microsoft. Jeff was able to announce that Danny Weitzner will be the new Domain Leader. He has been at the centre of Internet policy development since 1991, both in the United States and around the world. As a lawyer, coalition organizer, and public policy analyst with technical skills, he has regularly faced the challenge of forging sound, sensible public policy solutions to problems raised by the Internet. From the early-Web days (1992), he helped develop the case for the initial commercialisation of the Internet in the United States. Since then, he pioneered the 'user empowerment' policy approach for free expression and privacy issues. In 1995, he was public policy co-chair of the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) Steering Committee. Prior to joining W3C, Danny was Deputy Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a leading Internet policy and civil liberties organisation in Washington, DC.

His background and leadership in the policy arena will strengthen the Technology & Society Domain's role of addressing various policy issues raised by the Web and developing technology tools in collaboration with our Membership and the broader user communities world wide.

Jeff pointed out that we have worked closely with Danny and his colleagues at the Center for Democracy and Technology and expect to continue to leverage CDT's expertise in critical Internet free speech and privacy issues.

The highlight from the Architecture Domain was the switch to HTTP 1.1. It was estimated that 60% of the servers on the internet now support HTTP 1.1. There are 24 HTTP 1.1 implementations undergoing interoperability tests (including 10 from W3C Members).

In the User Interface Domain there have now been three submissions in the schematic graphics area. The RAL submission called Web Schematics, PGML from Adobe, IBM, Netscape and Sun and VML from Visio, Microsoft, Macromedia, HP and Autodesk. In consequence, a Working Group is being set up to formulate Recommendations in this area. Vincent Quint demonstrated Web Schematics in Amaya at the meeting.

The Web Accessibility Initiative have announced a public draft of Accessibility Guidelines for User Agents. This provides guidelines to user agent manufacturers (producers of browsers, players, etc.) for making their products more accessible to persons with different abilities including those accessing the Web through limited facility devices. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-WAI-USERAGENT/. Guidance on presentation adjustability; orientation information; navigation and control; organisation of accessibility features; and compatibility with a variety of technologies are all addressed. In addition, the guidelines highlight key elements of HTML 4.0 and Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2) where implementation in browsers is critical to ensure support for accessibility.

New Members

Membership continues to rise and has now reached 268 with a regional break down of:

Full Affiliate
Americas 39 119
Europe 33 46
Asia-Oceania 14 17

Recent new members are:

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