>
> Thomas Casey wrote:
> (snip)
> Now what do you mean by converting HTML to MHEG. If it's simply a
matter
> of handling HTML documents in the MHEG environment that is no problem.
If
> you mean mapping HTML features into an MHEG application that is more
> complex, but I'm sure it can be done, just as sure as it could also be
> mapped into COBOL. But is it worth it? Perhaps. I'm sure complex
features
> of HTML e.g., Frames and Tables require some thinking about, but it
would
> seem that list, and group objects combined in a scene could handle it.
> All of this needs further discussion, as I'm sure all of us realise
there
> are many good technologies out "there" waiting to be exploited.
MHEGers
> need to reconsider the relationship between HTML and MHEG. This is
> especially so since more and more people are concerned about defining
the
> convergence of Broadcast TV, Telecoms, Interactive TV, and Web
> technologies.
At 11:19 20/08/98 +0100, Sima Arman wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>I need to find information about converting HTML to MHEG. I need to
>know what the key issues are in designing web pages which needs to be
>converted to MHEG. I believe there are limitations such as frames,
>scroll bars. I have not managed to gather sufficient information, so i
>would be grateful if someone could tell me where to get some.
>Sima Arman
Dear all,
we have done a tool doing such a conversion from HTML to MHEG.
It is able of processing HTML3.2 and some 4.0.
As you said, frames and scroll bars are of course a big problem which we
do not yet have solved.
There are however some ideas on that how to save the information, but
loose the layout, which is a
maybe unsatisfying compromise.
Another thing to mention is of course scripting languages like JScript
and VBScript. There's no easy way to
transform those to MHEG. For Java-applets this could be done when
addressing MHEG-6, but our converter is designed for MHEG-5 up to now.
For the variable length of HTML pages it's of course evident that an
HTML page must in many cases be broken up into several MHEG-scenes.
(The tool we have is combined with an MHEG-5 application handling this
and many other things like entering WWW-URLs for on-the-fly translation
so the converter is acting as a WWW/MHEG gateway controlled by the MHEG
application "InternetGateway" at the client and communicating with the
gateway (on top of a DSM-CC server) by the DAVIC generic RPC mechanism -
RemoteProgram in MHEG.)
So there are indeed a number of restrictions to make HTML pages
available by MHEG-5, but after all it's possible to "translate" quite a
lot of HTML pages in the web to MHEG-5 scenes looking quite nice, and
furthermore it's possible to use HTML to design pages anf convert them
to MHEG.5 . just for the presentation of course, more sophisticated
things like streams, timers etc. would have to be added later on.
(We did such a plugin for MS Frontpage98, which works quite nice.)
If you should want any further information, please feel free to contact
me.
Best Regards,
Willi Stadler
-------------------------
DI Wilhelm Stadler
Head of Dept. Multimedia Systems
INFONOVA Information Technology
Karlauerguertel 1, A-8020 Graz
Tel: ++43 316 715440-0
Fax: ++43 316 715440-2