SMIL in high school

Hi Dale,

Thanks for your note on experiences with SMIL.
We find this sort of feedback quite useful.

A couple of things you may want to consider before starting
again with 
your project:
a. Unfortunately, there are not many authoring environments
that
    will help with your problem: either they hide the SMIL
part or
    they are very expensive.

b. In terms of error notification with parsing problems,
Ambulant
    tries to balance the needs of the developer (your
students) with
    those of SMIL users (who simply want to play some
presentation).

    In the current version of Ambulant (1.6 and 1.6.1),
there are
    several ways of getting extra information to cope with
    source-file problems
    a. In File->Preferences, set the parser to Xerces;
this
       turns document validation on. (Validate using the
DTD.)
    b. In File->Preferences, set the log level to Warning
    c. Use View->Log to see the contents of the log file.

    At some point in the future, we hope to give more pop-up
    information on parse problems in the same way that our
GRiNS
    player did this.

c. How can you help? First, keep those cards and letters
coming!!
    (This kind of feedback helps us set our development
priorities.)
    Second, you are welcome to see if you can work on things
like
    error message management. We can bring you in contact
with our
    developers to coordinate this activity.
    Third, you many want to help by contributing things like
a
    lesson plan or assignment suite -- we can profile this
on our
    site, and you can help lots of other HS/College groups
who would
    like to get their feet wet with SMIL.

Best wishes,

Dick Bulterman
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