SGML for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing

Who needs it? And who cares?

Due to popular demand, this discussion will now be broken into component parts to suit people with various backgrounds. First, two definitions:

Access technologies

A term we'll use here to encompass captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing

SGML

An acronym for Standard Generalized Markup Language. It's a means of using plain text to annotate the structure of various kinds of documents so those documents can be manipulated and displayed easily by a wide array of programs.

Now select the sentence that best describes you:

• I do know something about access technologies but do not know much about SGML.
• I do not know much about access technologies but I do know something about SGML.
• I do know something about both access technologies and SGML.
• I don't know much about either access technologies or SGML.

If this approach seems tedious to you, you can:

• Zip directly to HyTime, which can create correspondences between time-based information like music and and digital representations of music scores. (HyTime was also used to create Standard Music Description Language, details of which are available only in a PDF that's 49 pages long-- too lengthy to read on-screen, too lengthy to justify printing out. No easy summary of SMDL appears to exist.)
• Read an E-mail from John Lowe about <timeline>, which uses components of the Text Encoding Initiative for "time-aligned" text and sound.
• Check the detailed discussions I've written of possible uses of SGML in captioning and in audio description (with example).

Make sure, however, to look at the Common Issues in SGML for Access page, discussing the issues explicitly related to captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing: This lays out the main problems an SGML for Access data structure would have to solve.