Section: New Results

Multimedia Authoring

C2M project

The C2M project (see section 8.2.2 ) aims at developing industrial solutions that allow multimedia developers to achieve mass production with high quality results. It uses the SCENARI platform for document production and we have proposed a solution for dealing with multimedia content in such a framework [16] . Indeed, automatic tools are not always sufficient for generating high quality documents; manual editing of documents in their publishing format is often necessary to tune a number of details.

Our approach consists in providing a post-editing service to allow authors to adjust their multimedia presentations directly on the final form of documents. The first step is to provide a web rendering engine based on the latest advances in web standards, as described in section  6.1.1 . The second step consists in designing web-aware authoring tools based on this library, thus providing authors with direct editing services for producing high quality multimedia documents while preserving the advantages of using an XML production workflow. We have developed a prototype of this authoring tool in which all editing templates are described with XUL (XML User interface Language) and XBL (XML Binding Language) elements that we have defined for handling time-based content and widgets (timeContainer, timeNode, timeLine, etc.).

With such a solution, we can combine two worlds: a semantic-oriented authoring approach, as provided by an XML document workflow, and a direct web-based editing system. The first guarantees homogeneous rendering while the latter enables direct adjustments on the final form of the document. Bridging these two worlds is made possible by using declarative web languages (namely HTML5, SMIL and CSS) and implementing their timing part in the browser (with the Timesheets.js library, see section  6.1.1 ). The authoring components are directly mapped to the document structures.

On-line editing of multimedia web content

In cooperation with EPFL (Lausanne) we have continued to explore the concept of template-driven editing for XML multimedia contents (see section  3.3.2 ). This year, we have carried out more experiments with very different types of contents, including structured documents, factual data, and multimedia objects [17] .

These experiments have been done with the AXEL library developed by EPFL, based on our joint work on template languages. AXEL is an innovative client-side authoring tool that runs in the browser for editing XML documents, driven by an XTiger template. It allows average web users to easily edit XML content on web servers with no specific knowledge of XML. Our experiments have shown that the template-based approach significantly enhances the ability for web users to directly feed various applications with structured content.