Section: Scientific Foundations

Multimedia Authoring

Participants : Nicolas Hairon, Yohan Lasorsa, Jacques Lemordant, David Liodenot, Vincent Quint, Mathieu Razafimahazo, Cécile Roisin.

Structured editing

Multimedia documents are considered through several kinds of structures: logical organization, layout, time, linking, animations. We are working on techniques that allow authors of such documents to manipulate all these structures in homogeneous environments. The main objective is to support new advances in document formats without making the authoring task more complex. The key idea is to present simultaneously several views of the document, each view putting the emphasis on a particular structure, and to allow authors to manipulate each view directly and efficiently. As the various structures of a document are not independent from each other, views are “synchronized” to reflect in each of them the consequences of every change made in a particular view. The XML markup, although it can be accessed at any time, is handled by the tools, and authors do not have to worry about syntactical issues.

Template-driven editing

We have more recently experimented another way to edit highly structured XML documents without the usual complexity of the most common XML editors. The novelty of the approach is to use templates instead of XML schemas or DTDs, and to run the editor as a web application, within the browser. This way, it is much easier to create new document types and to provide an editing environment for these document types, that any web user can instantly use. This lightweight approach to XML editing complements the previous approach by covering new categories of XML applications.