Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC digital curriculum service in England

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 10:42 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> Alex, I know you're busy, but you seem to have a wealth of knowledge 
> about this field, both Flash and Java, which I'd describe as "the 
> browser plugins problem". Can you take a brain dump onto your wiki and 
> then list subscribers can try to update it sensibly as this 
> conversation develops?

Ok, this is an initial try:

http://www.affs.org.uk/~alex/HowDoWeReplaceFlash

I would love to see our grants being able to target this area. 

One thing we could do with more info on: I *think* Helix GPL player
supports SMIL2.0. I don't know if there is any attempt to plug SVG into
it; does anyone know? (List posts from 2002 indicate not; but that was a
while ago). 

The plugin problem is exactly that. If you want to combine SVG and SMIL,
for example, how does interactivity work? On non-free platforms, for
example, SMIL might be provided by RealPlayer, SVG by an Adobe plugin.
Can an interactive SVG animation affect the SMIL synchronisation/timing?
I would guess not. In order for SMIL+SVG(+XHTML?) to compete with Flash,
it needs to not just be feature-competitive, but integrated, so that the
features can actually be used. 

A practical approach might be to try and bump up the feature set of the
free Flash players. This still leaves us the problem of a) codecs (but
we can suggest, for example, Vorbis instead of mp3 and not get laughed
at) and b) content creation tools. But, baby steps.

Cheers,

Alex.