Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC digital curriculum service in England

[Phil Driscoll]

On Wednesday 13 October 2004 23:03, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
> If there is agreement that it is worth doing, is it feasible to start a
> "campaign" or "program" to try and get developers interested in a project
> to develop something like this?  How much money could be assigned, either
> as donations or formal grants?  What would the specifications be?  Is there
> any real chance of getting anything useable within a reasonable timeframe? 
> Do we try to integrate the existing bits like SVG and SMIL, or start from
> scratch?

I think that the only sensible long term goal (a goal which probably won't 
help much in this immediate context!) is to have a free, standards based, 
ubiquitous solution which provides the functionality currently supplied by 
Flash. SVG is a wonderful format, and in a browser environment combined with 
javascript and SMIL, I'm pretty sure the system can be coerced into doing 
everything which flash can do.

We now have SVG renderers embedded into some of our desktop environments, so 
it is clear that the SVG libraries must be up to a standard where the Mozilla 
and KHTML people ought to be able to start thinking about using them.

If we had browsers that could do this stuff, then we would need someone to do 
a flash -> SVG+javascript+SMIL converter and we wouldn't need flash players 
any more.

We would also need to make sure that the system is obviously better than Flash 
even for users who don't care about the technology or freedom, so that it has 
a chance of replacing the entrenched proprietary technology.

In the short term, I think it would be hard to do much without further 
encouraging the use of Flash. The only current multi-platform alternative 
which can match the functionality is Java, but to implement the interactive 
stuff in Java would greatly increase the BBC's authoring costs.


Cheers
-- 
Phil Driscoll