Subject: Re: HTML forms

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:06:44 -0800 (PST)

David,

Thanks for your message:

> Given a microphone capturing application that can
> capture a spoken phrase to a named file, the current
> HTML file upload form element is sufficient to upload
> that voice clip.

That is absolutly right, and it captures the essense of 
why the W3C should take an affirmative stance to 
standardize microphone upload.  Suppose you are developing 
a spoken language instruction system using asyncronous 
audio conferencing.  If you wanted to provide for students 
on several different platforms, you would have to provide 
a microphone capture application for each of them.  Then,
when the participants used your system, they would have 
to record, save to a file, select that file, and upload it 
as seperate operations, switching between the browser and 
microphone capture application each time.  If microphone 
upload were standardized, I estimate that it would save 
over ten mouse and key-clicks per upload, without having 
to distribute a supplemental application for each platform.

> MIME e-mail can carry voice clips and comments between
> teacher and student perfectly well.

Only a few mail user agents provide that capability.  Back 
in late 1996 some language instructors on one of the distance 
education lists (DEOS?) or newsgroups were claiming that 
voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least 
for some students.

> Streaming microphone data as something which would be part
> of a standard...

The device upload spec isn't for streaming, it uses only 
TCP-based HTTP POST enctype="multipart/form-data" HTML form 
submissions; see:
  http://www.bovik.org/device-upload.html

Cheers,
James

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 22:48:16 -0500

> a microphone capture application for each of them.  Then,

Sounds like a straw man to me.

When was the last time you bought a microphone/audio card for
a system that didn't include at least basic software to do this
sort of thing?

And I'm the one who always complains that vendors don't ship
support for AIX (Macromedia Flash, RealAudio, and StarOffice being
at the top of my wish list this week).

> Only a few mail user agents provide that capability.  Back

Well, the MIME spec came "out of the box" with audio MIME types.
Put the blame squarely on the MUA developers, the protocol supported
it - in fact, I believe one of the early MIME 'stress test' messages
included an audio clip, while RFC1341 was still at I-D status.

> voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least 

There are those who find VCR's challenging.  It isn't NTSC's or PAL's
fault...

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:37:59 PST, "James P. Salsman" said:
> There was a lot of concern that a consensus would be too dificult 
> to achieve unless there were some entry barriers.  The other 
> reasons involved mutual nondisclosure and similar features of 
> quickly-emerging technology companies.  None of those reasons

And you're claiming that with MORE voices, consensus would be easier
to achieve now?

Also, I've heard from several people "I have browser XYZ written by 3
or 4 people, it's tiny, fast, and implements most stuff".  Which,
actually, was my point - it's pretty easy to write a browser that will
implement MOST stuff.  However, by the time you do full HTML 4,
Javascript, SSL, CSS, Java, and whatever else, you're looking at a
pretty big pile of code, unless you're just in the "Let's see how far
into the wilderness we can push feature XYZ at the cost of other
support" game.  Sure, 2-3 programmers can get a basic minimal browser
done - but 2-3 programmers are probably not going to implement
*enough* of the esoteric stuff that they will start needing to worry
about what partially-specified feature XYZ really means, unless feature
XYZ is already widely acknowledged to be defined in a brain-dead manner...

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 23:42:43 -0800 (PST)

Valdis,

Thank you for your reply:

> a system that didn't include at least basic software to do 
> [recording to files]?

Not too many months.  Try any Linux on any of IBM's PCs with one 
of their soundcard/modem combinations; you'll see.  Sure, someone 
has a driver somewhere, but even top-of-the-line consumer Linuxes 
can't (or won't) auto-detect it, for IBM's most popular consumer 
models.  But simply providing such applications is not the
primary difficulty.

How many clicks and keystrokes does the recorder app on your 
desktop take to save a file?  How many to select that file in 
an INPUT TYPE=FILE widget?  Doesn't that tell you why, with a 
growing market in speech recognition-based language learning 
software, nobody seems to be using web file upload for 
microphone data upload?

> Well, the MIME spec came "out of the box" with audio MIME types.

None of which were suitable for spoken language instruction 
until RFC 2586.  The majority of them are still proprietary, 
and even the almost-state-of-the-art-and-wildly-popular MP3 
format is owned by a (litigiously overwhelmed) German firm.

> There are those who find VCR's challenging.  It isn't NTSC's or PAL's

We are talking about serving a population of students.  And a 
standards organization claiming to be dedicated to platform-
independence and interoperability, while simultaneously claiming 
that non-normative aspects of the proprietary OBJECT and EMBED 
elements absolve it from  complicity -- complicity not only 
in the promulgation of noninteroperable specifications that 
reinforce wintel dominance, but that expose ordinary browser 
users to the profoundly serious security risks of raw binary 
executable code.  For that latter reason alone I believe there 
is justifiable cause for the IETF to suspend the W3C's HTML 
type registration.

Plus, there are issues pertaining to the granularity of each 
recording.  With a web-based asynchronous audio conferencing 
system using microphone upload, the task of grading a plethora 
of spoken phrases turned in from students could be made to be 
much easier than trying to take care of the same number of 
email attachments.

Cheers,
James