notes on the Amsterdam demo of SMIL
Jim Davis
Jan 2000

It's a little annoying that the timed material gives you no control over
how long a scene remains up.  you can pause the player, but otherwise you
have no control.  you can't speed it up, stop it, slow down and you don't
know how long you have left to look at it.

in the Herengracht demo, sometimes I thought I was seeing two sides of the
street, but this is not so.

The bar at the bottom looks like a scrollbar, but it isn't proportional.

One scene (collage/bridges) shows a movie aligned on a larger still.  the
visual overlap of details makes it clear that we are seeing a movie OF THE
SAME PLACE.  The background is slightly blurred.  does this help convey
that this is indeed the BACKGROUND. (thus no need to search it for
details.)

The three by three arrangement on the splash screen

+--------------------+
|  A M S T E R D A M |
|                    |
| Xspace             |
|                    |
|       tiXme        |
|                    |
|              lineX |
+--------------------+

is ambiguous.  It seems like perhaps it's supposed to be grid, but it's not
lear.


The three main diagonal elements are made prominent by the large X and the
larger font used for the labels (space, time, links).  But this also
implies a parallelism between space, time and links that does not seem
warranted.

Is it supposed to imply a true three by three matrix?

If so, what are the rows and column labels?  I try to make a guess
       
 space SPACE     stroll    street ribbon
 
 time  timeline  TIME      time ribbon
   
 nav   collage   guided    LINKS
                 tour

but I don't have much confidence these are correct.