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

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 07:37 +0100, Phil Driscoll wrote:
> SVG is a wonderful format, and in a browser environment combined with 
> javascript and SMIL, I'm pretty sure the system can be coerced into
> doing everything which flash can do.

Except you're forgetting about audio and video, and particularly Flash's
ability to synchronise them. You cannot perform synchronisation using
Javascript, and you need some base codecs you can rely on to play the
audio/video - if the browser cannot do it natively, that means some kind
of plugin but you then again have a synchronisation problem.

(Synch is two-fold problem: firstly, how do I start video/animation at
the same time as sound? Second, how do I ensure that a video/animation
plays at the same speed as the sound, such that the two finish together?
These are harder questions than you might imagine if you haven't had
experience trying to synch things ;)

Your proposed Flash -> SMIL converter is almost certainly possible,
*except* that SMIL is linear (Flash isn't, it's non-linear so you can
make it interactive). Flash supports SMIL too, btw.

I think Helix is probably the only real player that could provide a SMIL
solution, and that does have audio/video, but I'm not sure about it's
abilities wrt. SVG or scripting :/

> We now have SVG renderers embedded into some of our desktop
> environments, so it is clear that the SVG libraries must be up to a
> standard where the Mozilla and KHTML people ought to be able to start
> thinking about using them.

The Moz SVG project is here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

Says it's still lacking (for example) animations, which is quite a
serious shortfall. That said, I don't think you need to implement all of
SVG to have something usable; ISTR SVG being one of the biggest, ugliest
standards around - 1.2 also has a lot of cruft that you wouldn't want
(e.g., network sockets support, IIRC), especially in a browser.

> In the short term, I think it would be hard to do much without further
> encouraging the use of Flash. 

Indeed. I'm thinking at this point that the shortest path to where we
want to go is going to be to up the standard of our Flash tools so that
we have comparable features in free software. It's likely that we need:

* support for the more modern Flash formats (v5 at least)
* support for Flash video and audio (not sure how advanced this is)
* support for ActionScript (ditto)

The GPL players seem to be able to render basic Flash fine, and animate
it, which is some part of the battle. 

Cheers,

Alex.