Received: from trawler.cwi.nl by hera.cwi.nl with SMTP id ; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 16:28:21 +0200 Received: by trawler.cwi.nl with SMTP id ; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 16:29:44 +0200 Message-Id: <9704291429.AA16778=lynda@trawler.cwi.nl> To: Jacco van Ossenbruggen Cc: Lloyd.Rutledge@cwi.nl Subject: A sort of Steve Newcomb trip report Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 16:29:43 +0200 From: Lynda Hardman Hoi Jacco, In English - 'cos I can write faster... I'm not sure that you _really_ need to know all this, but it's to collect my thoughts together and to partially convey to you what you missed today. (There was I trying to talk to Steve and Lloyd all on my own with no translator! Scarey :-) (Lloyd - please correct my most glaring errors....) I showed a couple of the demos to Steve, and we pointed at things at said our own words at them. It seemed to work. I gave him the link context article from HT '93, and he said "oh no - I never read this, now I understand" (you are right, context was a bad choice of word....) Steve is super enthusiatic about our work (Lloyd did mention that he is very often super enthusiastic, but maybe onyl when Lloyd is around...). In some sense not surprising, since we have been/are taking HyTime seriously. This is precisely what is worrying me: are we the only one taking this stuff seriously? Is it really this difficult to do right? I'm beginning to think yes. So what do we (the group) do? Dick is very keen that Lloyd comes up with a HyTime sell that shows that we can convert CMIF to HyTime and that can then be played on someone else's HyTime engine. The problem is, that no-one else is producing a HyTime engine that would be able to play multimedia documents. (Steve mentioned they hope to be adding the rendering module by the end of the year, but they haven't even begun to think about finite coordinate spaces.) My own partial solution is that we do this the other way round. We create a CMIF DTD. We let others take their documents and convert them to that DTD, and hey presto - _we_ can play the restult. (But in Dick's eyes - and he is right - you get the loop we can take CMIF, convert to HyTime, convert to CMIF and hey - we can still play it....) Another partial solution is to take the stylesheet route, and show how any CMIF document can be converted to MHEG, English only version, CD-ROM version, or whatever, via the HyTime stylesheet route. This could be done with separate programs for each conversion - but the stylesheet advantage is declarative conversions. Is this advantage sellable? Doable within finite(sic.) timescales? Neither of these look sellable to Dick or the Chameleon meeting (beginning of June). We have 4 weeks.... Of course the really exciting news is, that if we need some HyTime prcocessing, Steve will give it to us. That means that you can do some real stuff with HyTime processing - although they don't have DSSSL yet. Lloyd will no doubt organise us soon.... Een prettige konninginnedag... Lynda