RE: HTML forms
Anyone know whether Opera has microphone upload yet? More to the point, does anyone care? Well, sure, Opera probably cares whether they have a feature that Tim Berners-Lee claims is an integral part of the HTML standard, but hasn't yet been implemented by any of their competitors: http://www.bovik.org/devup/tbl-devup.txt Over 150 people have told me, using a web-based endorsement form, that they want the elegant symmetry that general device input and upload would provide. Traditionally, helper applications for browsers have handled output presentation. The same facilities can be used for input from any number of sources and uploaded using standard form submission. This will enable interoperability that closed cartels can not, with much greater customer approval. Anyone whose life would be enriched by ease in implementing and performing media upload, be it audio, video, images, text editor files, or even raw serial input should care, even if they do not at present. One of the strongest supporters is a Professor of Linguistics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, who probably means a lot of potential sales, given the number of cadets that he is responsible for teaching spoken languages to. Those who wish to register their support are encouraged to vote: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showvotes.cgi?voteon=46135 on this Mozilla feature request: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46135 Cheers, James
RE: HTML forms
Thanks for the confirmation there Lloyd :) J. --- On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, James P. Salsman wrote: Anyone know whether Opera has microphone upload yet? More to the point, does anyone care? L. [EMAIL PROTECTED]PGPhttp://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/
ACCEPT and DEVICE (was Re: HTML forms)
Stephanos, Thanks for your message: ... You need detailed definitions, changes to DTDs, and more. If you have these details, it would be nice to point us all to a proposal so we know how "DEVICE" and "MAXTIME" would work. Sorry about not pointing to this document: http://www.bovik.org/device-upload.html in every message. It started out as an Internet Draft in late 1997. WHAT CONCERNS [from Norman Solomon's article in FAIR's _Extra!_], and HOW DO THEY RELATE TO THIS DISCUSSION? The same concerns I had after participating in the W3C's extended forms working group for most of last year -- that they care far more about e-commerce that they should (to the point of wanting to completely overhaul perfectly serviceable HTML forms as the are) and at the same time are seriously neglecting educational needs. ... We've HAD this technical discussion here AGES ago. Create a form, give it an accept type of audio/whatever and let the user agent bother about how to get it. If that's too primitive for your needs, go and create a separate protocol Not only does the chair of the HTML Working Group and everyone else in the W3C who has spoken out on the topic, including Tim Berners-Lee, agree with these sentiments, SO DO I!!! In a perfect world, all of the browser authors would implement device upload using the ACCEPT attribute within INPUT TYPE=FILE. However, in the world we live in, NONE of them have done that. The only reason why that I've been able to find, after years of communication with them and studying their code, when it has been available, is that many major releases of the big-two browsers have interpreted the ACCEPT attribute as a filename pattern. The underlying reason is that at for a long while, the official HTML 3.2 specification suggested ACCEPT was supposed to be a filename pattern, so that was the correct behavior as interpreted by the browser developers, and it has probably become part of some legacy application somewhere. So people have a choice, between idealism, where everybody faithfully implements the specs exactly as they are handed down (even if they don't remain consistent between revisions of the same version number), and pragmatism, where the introduction of an extra attribute (such as DEVICE) would allow the browser authors to rest easy that they aren't breaking anyone's legacy implementations of a ACCEPT, while at the same time providing a way to specify a default device selection. Setting aside the fact that the HTML Working Group claims it would be bad user interface design to allow for the selection of a default (a position I find untenable), which is the practical choice? Which is better for spoken language instruction? Which makes it more likely that mass-market portable wireless boxes will implement high-quality asynchronous voice messaging even under very-low-bandwidth conditions? Cheers, James P.S. sorry about the echoed message sans my reply
Re: support for device upload (was Re: HTML forms)
James, bottom line is, this is a W3C matter. you need to convince *them*. Keith
Re: HTML forms
Valdis, Thank you for your reply: When was the last time you bought a microphone/audio card for a system that didn't include at least basic software to do [recording to files]? Not too many months. Try any Linux on any of IBM's PCs with one of their soundcard/modem combinations; you'll see. Sure, someone has a driver somewhere, but even top-of-the-line consumer Linuxes can't (or won't) auto-detect it, for IBM's most popular consumer models. But simply providing such applications is not the primary difficulty. How many clicks and keystrokes does the recorder app on your desktop take to save a file? How many to select that file in an INPUT TYPE=FILE widget? Doesn't that tell you why, with a growing market in speech recognition-based language learning software, nobody seems to be using web file upload for microphone data upload? Well, the MIME spec came "out of the box" with audio MIME types. None of which were suitable for spoken language instruction until RFC 2586. The majority of them are still proprietary, and even the almost-state-of-the-art-and-wildly-popular MP3 format is owned by a (litigiously overwhelmed) German firm. in late 1996 some language instructors on one of the distance education lists (DEOS?) or newsgroups were claiming that voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least for some students. There are those who find VCR's challenging. It isn't NTSC's or PAL's fault... We are talking about serving a population of students. And a standards organization claiming to be dedicated to platform- independence and interoperability, while simultaneously claiming that non-normative aspects of the proprietary OBJECT and EMBED elements absolve it from complicity -- complicity not only in the promulgation of noninteroperable specifications that reinforce wintel dominance, but that expose ordinary browser users to the profoundly serious security risks of raw binary executable code. For that latter reason alone I believe there is justifiable cause for the IETF to suspend the W3C's HTML type registration. Plus, there are issues pertaining to the granularity of each recording. With a web-based asynchronous audio conferencing system using microphone upload, the task of grading a plethora of spoken phrases turned in from students could be made to be much easier than trying to take care of the same number of email attachments. Cheers, James
Re: HTML forms
Harald, Thanks for your message: There is no procedure to "suspend control of aspects" of a specification, The proposal would involve ammending the registration of the text/html media type, incorporating the W3C standards extended with two attributes of the INPUT element, DEVICE and MAXTIME. ... the IETF is of the opinion that HTML is not under our control anyway. I understand that. There might be substantial benefits from reconsidering those opinions. Within the IETF, public debate is assured on almost all controversial matters. The W3C, however, constrains meaningful debate to those willing and able to pay US$50,000 per year. I agree that there was a point in the early development of web standards when that constraint was beneficial. Now, however, with Netscape owned by a company shipping MSIE, and the stagnation or regression of the core HTML standards, along with the concerns raised in Norman Solomon's article, I believe the time has come to return certain aspects of the control of HTML to the IETF. Even if that view is not shared by the IETF, I the only way I would not be certain that a debate on the topic would be healthy for the Internet communty would be if the W3C were to take an affirmative stand on issues involving microphone upload for language instruction and asyncronous audio conferencing. Cheers, James
Re: HTML forms
On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 13:03:07 PST, "James P. Salsman" said: is assured on almost all controversial matters. The W3C, however, constrains meaningful debate to those willing and able to pay US$50,000 per year. I agree that there was a point in the early development of web standards when that constraint was beneficial. Now, however, with Netscape owned by a company Why was it beneficial then? shipping MSIE, and the stagnation or regression of the core HTML standards, along with the concerns raised in Norman Solomon's article, I believe the time has come to return certain aspects And why is it non-beneficial now, given the apparent complexity of getting a product shipped (look at the current state of Mozilla)? Let's face it - anybody who intends to ship a working browser will need to have enough programmers that the $50K is the least of the problems. Yes, this cuts Mozilla out unless somebody pays for their membership. On the other hand, are there any other *real* contenders for whom $50K would be a hardship? of the control of HTML to the IETF. Even if that view is not shared by the IETF, I the only way I would not be certain that a debate on the topic would be healthy for the Internet communty would be if the W3C were to take an affirmative stand on issues involving microphone upload for language instruction and asyncronous audio conferencing. Umm.. Microphone upload is the *least* of the many challenges facing HTML at the current time. -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech
Re: HTML forms
Valdis, Thank you for your reply to my message: ... The W3C... constrains meaningful debate to those willing and able to pay US$50,000 per year. I agree that there was a point in the early development of web standards when that constraint was beneficial Why was it beneficial then? There was a lot of concern that a consensus would be too dificult to achieve unless there were some entry barriers. The other reasons involved mutual nondisclosure and similar features of quickly-emerging technology companies. None of those reasons should have ever been assumed to be perminant. Another benefit was that the membership fees established a great infrastructure of facilities and staff for the W3C And why is it non-beneficial now...? Well, I've already given a couple reasons beyond those of Normon Solomon's, but consider this: The W3C has over 400 members! http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List That's over US$20 million in annual membership fees. Typical W3C members don't even seem to realize they are part of the consortium. For example, TIAA-CREF and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic are both members. But after days on the phone and over email, nobody I've reached within those organizations has any idea who their W3C Advisory Committee representative is. Recording for the Blind asks me for money every few months, and I've given to them in the past, but knowing that they spend $50K a year without any idea who their AC rep. is makes it a lot less likely for me to want to donate anything else to them. It would be different if their AC rep. stood up for their interests, but nobody at Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic with whom I've spoken had even the faintest idea what microphone upload was or how it could benefit them. Same with TIAA-CREF, supposedly representing the interests of tens of thousands of language teachers. On the other hand, are there any other *real* contenders for whom $50K would be a hardship? Absolutly. The foremost are probably the developers of Emacs' w3-mode, but I'm sure I could name a dozen tiny browser-developing projects of one kind or another, if you're interested. How about the developers of LWP.pm and CGI.pm -- do you expect them to plop down 50 grand anytime soon? Cheers, James
Re: HTML forms
On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:06:44 PST, "James P. Salsman" said: audio conferencing. If you wanted to provide for students on several different platforms, you would have to provide a microphone capture application for each of them. Then, Sounds like a straw man to me. When was the last time you bought a microphone/audio card for a system that didn't include at least basic software to do this sort of thing? And I'm the one who always complains that vendors don't ship support for AIX (Macromedia Flash, RealAudio, and StarOffice being at the top of my wish list this week). Only a few mail user agents provide that capability. Back Well, the MIME spec came "out of the box" with audio MIME types. Put the blame squarely on the MUA developers, the protocol supported it - in fact, I believe one of the early MIME 'stress test' messages included an audio clip, while RFC1341 was still at I-D status. in late 1996 some language instructors on one of the distance education lists (DEOS?) or newsgroups were claiming that voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least for some students. There are those who find VCR's challenging. It isn't NTSC's or PAL's fault... On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:37:59 PST, "James P. Salsman" said: There was a lot of concern that a consensus would be too dificult to achieve unless there were some entry barriers. The other reasons involved mutual nondisclosure and similar features of quickly-emerging technology companies. None of those reasons And you're claiming that with MORE voices, consensus would be easier to achieve now? Also, I've heard from several people "I have browser XYZ written by 3 or 4 people, it's tiny, fast, and implements most stuff". Which, actually, was my point - it's pretty easy to write a browser that will implement MOST stuff. However, by the time you do full HTML 4, Javascript, SSL, CSS, Java, and whatever else, you're looking at a pretty big pile of code, unless you're just in the "Let's see how far into the wilderness we can push feature XYZ at the cost of other support" game. Sure, 2-3 programmers can get a basic minimal browser done - but 2-3 programmers are probably not going to implement *enough* of the esoteric stuff that they will start needing to worry about what partially-specified feature XYZ really means, unless feature XYZ is already widely acknowledged to be defined in a brain-dead manner... -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech
Re: HTML forms
"James P. Salsman" wrote: Some educational software advocates and I are considering asking the IETF to suspend control of certain aspects of HTML forms from the W3C until microphone upload issues are addressed. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Gad. Get a life. Really. I'm gone a month from www-html and the first message I get upon resubscribing is this one. Looks like it's time to unsubscribe again. Bye. Murray ... Murray Altheimmailto:altheim#x40;eng.sun.com XML Technology Center Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025 But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? -- Galatians 4:9
Re: HTML forms
Murray, Thank you for the substance of your debate: ... Get a life A life is best given with education (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27.) If microphone upload were prevalent, would asynchronous audio conferencing make spoken language instruction easier enough to help at least one other person? But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? -- Galatians 4:9 With the disclaimer that I am a strictly nonevangelical friend, here is a response in kind: And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand. -- Luke 8:10 The whole point of microphone upload is to help teach languages where simple audio output is insufficient. Evaluation of audio input is necessary for effective speech training and accent reduction. Cheers, James
Re: HTML forms
At 16:52 29.03.00 -0800, James P. Salsman wrote: Some educational software advocates and I are considering asking the IETF to suspend control of certain aspects of HTML forms from the W3C until microphone upload issues are addressed. No matter what may be thought of the merits of the case, such a request would be ignored by the IETF. There is no procedure to "suspend control of aspects" of a specification, and the IETF is of the opinion that HTML is not under our control anyway. Sorry 'bout that. Harald -- Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway [EMAIL PROTECTED]
