Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Joost Geurts, Lynda Hardman, and Lloyd Rutledge
Towards a Formatting Vocabulary for Time-based Hypermedia
In: The Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2003)
Budapest, Hungary pp. 384-393
ACM Press, May 20-24, 2003
See also: www2003.
Available at http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p383/p383-ossenbruggen.html
Available at http://www.cwi.nl/~media/publications/www2003/p383-ossenbruggen.html
Available at http://www.cwi.nl/~media/publications/www2003/p383-ossenbruggen.pdf
Time-based, media-centric Web presentations can be described declaratively in the XML world through the development of languages such as SMIL. It is difficult, however, to fully integrate them in a complete document transformation processing chain. In order to achieve the desired processing of data-driven, time-based, media-centric presentations, the text-flow based formatting vocabularies used by style languages such as XSL, CSS and DSSSL need to be extended. The paper presents a selection of use cases which are used to derive a list of requirements for a multimedia style and transformation formatting vocabulary. The boundaries of applicability of existing text-based formatting models for media-centric transformations are analyzed. The paper then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a fully-fledged time-based multimedia formatting model. Finally, the discussion is illustrated by describing the key properties of the example multimedia formatting vocabulary currently implemented in the back-end of our Cuypers multimedia transformation engine.