The Tower of Babel continues. "Accessible" is in the eye of the
producer. Stay tuned!
The following article is from EE Times for December 23, 1996, and is
copyright 1996, CMP Publications. Available from their web page.
----- Forwarded message begins here -----
From: Lloyd G. Rasmussen <lras>
To: lras@loc.gov
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 23:23:15 -0500
Subject: webworld.html
[ISMAP]
Visit Mentor Graphics LSI Logic Home Page
[INLINE]
Web world tuning Java, HTML for TV
By Junko Yoshida
SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Expecting television-based Internet access to
swell the population of Net surfers, information-appliance vendors and
software developers are separately working on Java subsets and
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) extensions that would make Web
content for the TV platform look, sound and function more like
standard television fare.
WebTV Networks Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), PowerTV Inc. (Cupertino,
Calif.) and ViewCall America (Norcross, Ga.) all confirmed last week
that they're developing their own HTML extensions or tags with TV
access in mind. And both Steve Perlman, WebTV Networks' president and
chief executive officer, and Ken Morse, chief technical officer at
PowerTV, said their companies are separately working with JavaSoft to
develop Java subsets for TV-based content. Perlman said WebTV's Java
subset could be ready by February or March.
The flurry of activity is stirring interest among content developers
intrigued by the prospect of bringing their Internet offerings to a
potential market of 800 million TV-owning households worldwide. Some
of the confirmed HTML and Java projects, however, aren't yet ready for
prime time.
A JavaSoft spokeswoman stressed that there is "no formal project or no
product plan at JavaSoft right now" for a TV-tweaked Java subset. "If
anything, it's an experiment in our lab," she said. "People at WebTV
have had some conversations with people here and may be doing some
tinkering. But it's not clear when, if ever, anything that they might
be working on with JavaSoft engineers will be published."
The proliferation of independent initiatives, meanwhile, could force
content developers to publish multiple versions of their Web sites for
an ungainly range of appliances. Development of a TV-specific Java
subset also might mean that Java applets could no longer be guaranteed
to run on any platform.
Yet Internet-appliance vendors insist that Java's run times,
application-programming interface (API) and applets are simply too
unwieldy to be manageable on memory-constrained set-tops. "In our
WebTV box, we only have 2 Mbytes of memory," said Perlman. "We need a
subset of Java."
PowerTV's Morse acknowledged the desirability of a standard subset,
but claimed that "the PowerTV set-top today has full Java applets up
and running in our lab." PowerTV set-tops, such as the Pegasus box
ordered by Time Warner Cable, use 2 Mbytes of DRAM for MPEG decoding
and graphics and 1 Mbyte for the CPU. A built-in
unified-memory-management system allows the memory units to be
dynamically shared between the two ASICs. The box also has 1 Mbyte of
flash and 1 Mbyte of ROM.
Indisputable push
Partisan differences aside, few would dispute the industrywide
momentum to recast the Internet for TV. "We've already solved display
issues and cost issues," said WebTV's Perlman, who has taken the first
stab at bringing the Web to TV with partners Sony and Philips. "The
Internet is already accessible to TV viewers."
The unresolved issues, he said, concern "content -- how to make Web
sites more attractive and entertaining to the TV audience."
"Most viewers are not looking for the experience of wading through the
deep water of interactivity on a TV," said WebTV evangelist John Lee.
"They also expect to see cool, TV-like transitions from one page to
another."
Jon Haass, director and product marketing manager at OpenTV-platform
and -middleware developer Thomson Sun Interactive, said that those
working to fine-tune HTML should keep in mind that "horizontal
scrawling is bad on TV" and that the presentation of "too much text on
a page, as well as too many pages, is also discouraging to TV
viewers."
The industry seeks a set of HTML tags that would give developers
tighter control over content delivery and display, said WebTV's Lee.
WebTV's published versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the WebTV HTML interface
detail WebTV-specific performance and functions, style guides, new
tags, attributes and underlying technology for handling text, graphics
and sound.
Before this year is out, Lee said, WebTV will disclose its HTML
extension efforts "together with companies in the software industry,
Web-page designers and very large names in the content business."
ViewCall America, an Internet-service company targeting the non-PC
consumer market, is also pursuing development of a "lingua franca" for
creating TV-centric Web sites, said editorial director George Donahue.
Despite TV HTML's trademark status, Donahue said, ViewCall's "plan is
to keep TV HTML as an open standard. The company hopes to make sure
that TV HTML will run on various browsers as well as a variety of TV
platforms." By contrast, he said, "WebTV appears to be building
proprietary WebTV HTML Interfaces for their platform."
The ViewCall work is still in its early stages. "We are identifying
necessary tags now and plan to create them as we go along," said
Donahue. The company plans to publish a list of completed and planned
special tags by the spring.
PowerTV's Morse outlined three main HTML issues: "supporting effective
video overlay, so we can overlay Web pages on TV programming; defining
video positioning, to allow video in a window; and defining URL
support for TV channel tuning."
PowerTV is working on all three issues and seeks collective action
from an industry-wide forum. Morse said the company has submitted a
proposal to the Association for Interactive Media (AIM), a
Washington-based trade association that will review feature
requirements brought to the table by member companies.
The extent of AIM's ability to build industry consensus, however,
remains unknown. Peter Waldheim, chief executive officer of the
organization, said AIM's User Interface Council -- one of several
leadership councils within the group -- will likely touch on the
HTML-extension issue for the TV platform. But he cautioned that the
work is "still in the exploration phase. Exactly how each leadership
council chooses its specific missions will need to go through a two-
or three-month voting period first."
Meanwhile, not everyone agrees that HTML extensions are necessary.
Thomson Sun Interactive's Haass, describing its TV-content HTML
guidelines as "TVML," said the company is "not trying to change HTML.
What we call TVML is still the same HTML."
Rather than expect Web-page designers to develop multiple versions of
the same Web pages for different platforms, Haass said that a more
sensible approach might be to "filter necessary Web pages at head
ends." Network operators would use filtering systems to put Web pages
in the appropriate format for the intended platform.
Even as they pitch their independent approaches, Internet-platform
vendors say standards are the goal. The current confusion, said
PowerTV's Morse, "may be a little divergence that may last a short
time -- a year or so."
After that, de facto standards will emerge as developers pick the best
of the available options.
[LINK] Go To Previous Story
Go To Next Story [LINK]
[INLINE] Back to This Week's News
------ Forwarded message ends here ------
Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service f/t Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress 202-707-0535
lras@loc.gov
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:04 PST