[OLPC library] Content formats for the XS and XO

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Seth Woodworth <seth at laptop.org> wrote:
>>  - if Browse.xo gets served a speex file with the right mimetype, does
>> it do the right thing?
>
> Yes.  It didn't as of 656, but it did as of 711 and does in 767

Cool.

>>  - do browsers in other desktop/laptop platforms (conventional linux,
>> Windows, OSX) do the right thing?
>
> *nix yes,
> OSX sometimes,
> Windows... not in IE and I don't think so in FF 3.1 maybe

Is Ogg better in terms of existing support? It's been around for
longer, and we hit vid and audio in one go. Librivox is all
Ogg'ified...

> They're not yet encoded as speex @ archive.org.

Hmmm... Speex has been in existence for a while, but it has the
strange achievement of being used less than Ogg ;-)

So clearly the XO supports it. I would still recommend Ogg if the
content producer can support only one format.

> Your ubuntu machine should already have a speex file on it.

Indeed - my machine plays the sample files from speex.org directly from ffox.

So an updated formats list:

 - ASCII
 - HTML/XHMTL/CSS
 - PNG
 - SVG
 - Ogg
 - Speex
 - PDF (somewhat discouraged - editable content is nicer)
 - Flash (discouraged unless you have the resources to ensure it is
Gnash compatible)
 - Editable content - RTF as it is the default for Write.xo . Or HTML.

and should be wrapped in an "IMS-CP" formatted package, which is a
fancy way of saying "a zipfile with a manifest and some DublinCore
metadata".

I have done some work with IMS-CP, and the format is trivial enough...
but the standards documents are horrible. Used to have a cheatsheet on
it -- but can't find it.

The XS will definitely support IMS-CP. No promise to support some of
the fancy and convoluted things it lets you define -- our platform is
mainly interested in

 - metadata to organise, browse and find the content
 - a pointer to the 'index' file if your CP has a big forest of html pages

in other words, we keep it simple, simon.

cheers,


m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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