After having visited the land of transcription as my first stop in the world of Web video, the next logical step was to look into how this wonderful transcription of my video could be actually shown along with the video.
Transcriber, the tool I used to generate the captions of the video, saves the transcription into its own XML format:
So, my exploration in world of Web video started in the land of transcription.
As I mentioned previously, one of the requirements for us on the W3C Staff to be allowed to publishing media content is to make sure it meets some minimal level of accessibility, and in the current (draft) state of affairs, this means providing a transcription of its content. (Oct 8 2009: that policy is now publicly available)
My first reaction to that policy was slightly annoyed: I was afraid this would create too high a barrier on us from publishing multimedia content, which in this age and days seems to be a fairly important expression mechanism.
A colleague of mine recently pointed me to Michael Wesch’s great and inspiring anthropological introduction to YouTube, which made me curious about the use of video as an expression mechanism on the Web.
Coupling this with my recent upgrade in the camcorder world to a fully digital device, and the early results of the Video in the Web activity W3C started a year ago, I had to start playing in this area to understand it better.
As a starting point, I thought that I would use the video of the presentation I made to ParisWeb back in 2007 on the Mobile Web Best Practices, also available un-flashed on ParisWeb servers – usefully made available in a by-nc-sa Creative Commons license.