Monday 2002.8.5
XML makes me SMIL | I've been prototyping a solution for a corporate communications company. Without giving too much away, the company now makes live presentations using very high quality video, although very structured, the content is never the same for each presentation as the presenter reacts to the audience and changes the presentation on the fly to satisfy the interest of each audience. They want to find a simple way of representing a presentation on the web immediately after the live presentation is made.
We tried Flash MX, after falling for the hype about its ability to reference video sources at runtime, but we found that the quality of the video was below requirements and it had some other irritations. We've just finished doing some tests with QuickTime 6, MPEG-4 and SMIL 1.0, this stuff is breathtaking. It may not end up being our final solution... QuickTime seems to have one irritating minor bug when you start to do complicated interactive nesting with SMIL in the browser and we are angsting over the 'plugin dilemma' -- how Corporate types will take to having to install QuickTime 6. But whatever we end up doing, I'm completely besotted with SMIL... I just wanted to share the love ;) ...and QuickTime and MPEG-4 are none too shabby either.
BTW does it strike anyone else as odd that Macromedia use QuickTime to deliver their web based product Howto's?... This one struck me as particularly ironic. 
Conditional Comments | Protocol 7 points to this tip about a conditional commenting feature of Netscape 4. I've never heard of this technique either, very cool. [via protocol7]
NZ Govt web guidlines | New Zealand's e-government initiative has published its Web Guidelines, which include an endorsement of the use of standards such as... [Buzz]
