[tei-council] some questions about non-textual components and media

[Martin Holmes]

On 12-12-18 10:04 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>
> On 18 Dec 2012, at 17:36, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca>
>   wrote:
>> I think the scenarios we should be thinking about here are
>>
>>   - Born-digital documents that include media files (e.g. journal
>> articles including audio or video).
>
> exactly. where the original _does_ have the control and annotation
> features present and you want to capture them.

In the case of born-digital documents, there's nothing to capture: 
you're authoring directly. Imagine you're writing for a journal like 
DHQ. You (as author) know you want to include a media file, which you do 
in a simple way; DHQ has its own rendering pipelines, and it handles the 
display of video or audio in ways conforming to its own styleguide, 
depending on the output format. It's not the author's or encoder's job 
to worry about that.

> you just end up
> passing everything off to @rend and @rendition and @style,
> and I doubt they are powerful enough to cope with all that. After all,
> if they were expressible in CSS, HTML5 would not have included all that jazz, surely?

Sure, but in this scenario, you don't care. It's up to the publisher or 
the web application designer what to do with it.

> The document you are describing in TEI  may have an _authorial_  decision as to
> whether a video should loop or not when being played. It is the usual
> @rend stuff.

I think if the author wants to do such complex stuff, they can import 
the HTML5 elements and attributes.

> I betcha that when we added <graphic> someone said "why isn't it <media> (vel sim)"
> and a sage someone said "ah now, graphics are easy, but video and audio are harder,
> steer clear". Whether that someone was me, Lou, Syd, or my fevered imagination
> I don't know.

There are lots of other things you can say about graphics too -- 
thumbnail sizes, different resolutions available, lossy encodings vs 
archive quality versions, etc. But most people don't really need them, 
and they're happy with just <graphic>.

> what the heck. i have the code ready for audio and video anyway, cos I just
> abuse <graphic> :-}

That worries me more than the implications of a new relatively basic 
<media> element. Especially if the content is audio; it's flat-out 
misleading, surely.

Cheers,
Martin

> --
> Sebastian Rahtz
> Director (Research Support) of Academic IT Services
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)