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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML multimedia specs -- help for the bewildered, please?
 XML multimedia specs -- help for the bewildered, please?I've spent most of my professional life in graphics and the communication arts, either on the ad agency side or for in-house graphics/creative departments, and I've been watching XML's contributions to the graphics world closely. I take a user's perspective within groups or lists like this one, which is pretty much why I keep my mouth shut except when user-related issues like this come up. Unfortunately, all of the graphics-related specs are plagued with the internecine warfare that companies feel compelled to wage in order to gain a marketplace advantage. SMIL has always suffered from lukewarm support from Microsoft. Currently, there are three major formats that have to be taken into account for video distribution: Windows Media Player files, Real Media, and now Quicktime, which is gaining momentum. Quicktime and Real Media use SMIL to manage synchronization (if you want to use XML for managing sync), but Windows Media uses ASX. Microsoft also has its own vector markup language (VML) that they like to say is not meant to compete with SVG (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/) but does. If SVG rather than VML was used to convert PowerPoint presentations, what effect would that have on SVG's success in the marketplace? (not that many people bother with such conversions). Similarly, Macromedia has been pretty silent on SVG, I'm sure because they perceive it as a threat to Flash. Why they can't simply incorporate it into Flash is beyond me. There are folks who have already come up with conversion utilities, so it's not a technical issue. So, currently, there is very little ROI in multimedia, which is why you see so much lousy work out there. The short answer, then, is none of the languages you mentioned fit together because companies won't agree on the global standards necessary to make them work. I'm sure various representatives from these companies on this list will beg to differ, but until a spec proves ubiquitous I'm not presenting it as a commercially viable option to any of my clients, who are only interested in smooth, painless implementations. Right now our conmpany's use of XML is limited to some server-side implementations, generally as a way to communicate with Flash files or convert the occasional XML file to PDF. Of course, web services are pretty interesting, but that's another subject. Now that you've seen the short version of my rant, I'd say the one to watch is SVG because you can, potentially, build an entire site with it. You can build menus, interactive elements, animation (especially when combining with SMIL). In order to gain a true foothold in the designer community a powerful visual editor is needed that allows folks to manipulate the DOM. Adobe Illustrator has an SVG pallete that makes it possible to do such scripting, but no designers I know would be willing to plunge that deeply into the level of coding necessary to make it work. The spec has just turned into a Proposed Recommendation, so hopefully things will take off soon. Macromedia could give SVG a serious kick start, but I haven't seen any indications that they are prepared to do so. I do think that the real sleeper in all of this may just be XSLFO (XSL Formatting Objects), but that's a long way off. The simple fact that none of the major software vendors has created an alternative (yet) makes it promising. As for 3D, currently, there are two areas of activity that I'm aware of (but there may be more): the X3D spec you mentioned and a 3D language being pushed by Viewpoint and Adobe (http://www.viewpoint.com/developerzone/5-0.html). Naturally, these groups don't seem to be working together, but I could be mistaken. I don't know if this helps at all, or if this just served as an opportunity to voice my displeasure over the way companies handle spec development. If it's the latter, my apologies, but these things need to be said from time to time. Chuck White CEO The Tumeric Partnership http://www.tumeric.net work: 415-585-4178 chuck@t... ________________________________________ Author, Mastering XML, Premium Edition Sybex Books, May, 2001 http://www.javertising.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike.Champion@S... To: xml-dev@l... Sent: Monday, August 13, 2001 3:06 PM Subject: XML multimedia specs -- help for the bewildered, please? I've been seeing announcements about various XML-related specs having to do with multimedia and rich graphics. Does anyone have some perspective as to how they fit together (or don't), which have the most potential in the "real world", and any observations as to what (if anything) one can do with generic XML tools to work with these formats? Is there some good independent/neutral source of information about this stuff? The ones I know of include: SMIL 2.0 (new W3C Recommendation, see http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/) X3D (successor to VRML) launched (http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2001-08-09-a.html) MPEG-7 (an XML packaging format to bind multimedia objects together?) http://www.mpeg-7.com/ Any others? Thanks! 
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