4. Authors' needs

4.1 Introduction

With the emergence of the above languages, and SMIL in particular, authors might expect to have editing environments tailored to their needs at their disposal. In fact, this is far from being the case, and one could even say that it's almost a desert in this field! The tool most often used to produce a multimedia document is a simple text editor, or possibly an XML editor! For example, there is little or no environment for editing SMIL documents. Oratrix's Grins software was the only one on the market, but its development was halted several years ago (although it was revived to create Ambulant software). Other software, such as LimSee (Weck, 2004), developed at Inria, are prototypes. What accounts for this lack of tools? The first reason is that, until now, the production...