Ben wrote that he hopes I will dive deep into decoupling the type or name of the markers from the data-driven information, and I want to respond that this is an important part of decoupling the link from the response to that link, though I’m not sure it is totally required.
The case for unnamed Markers
The argument in favor starts with the observation that there is a natural tendency to think of the source video and the target (linked-to) video as a single unit.
For example, assume you are working with the video shown in the upper left corner in the figure below and you note that at this point the user is assumed to understand how to handle events in a templated control, but may need more information. It is natural to assume that the hyper-video link would that issue, and would “of course” lead to a video (or blog post or article) to provide that background information.
It would be natural to name the marker placed here “ClickEventForTemplatedControl.” The simple act of changing the name of the marker to (e.g.,) Marker7 might free you in some ways to think about linking to lots of other supporting material as well.
Circular Error Probability (C.E.P.)
Weapons experts talk about Circular Error Probability, which Wikipedia describes as “an intuitive measure of a weapon system’s accuracy… defined as a circle, centered about the mean, whose boundary is expected to include 50% of the population within it.
A key difference between a hyper-link in hyper-text and a hyperlink in video is that in hypertext I can create a link with exact placement, down to a punctuation mark! Video, by its nature, does not easily lend itself to such precision. Thus you are left with two options:
- You indicate to the user that there is more information, but leave some inevitable uncertainty (CEP) about what it is that you are linking from or
or 2. You add text to indicate precisely what the hyper-video link will provide.
There are advantages in the very imprecision of the first example that I’m not sure we’ve all had time to think about, let alone explore, but I intuit that this is an area rich in possibilities, both for creating infuriating and frustrating user experiences and, possibly, for creating wondrously flexible creative interfaces.
Videos and Blogs and Cabbages and Kings
I’m actively recording these videos but they’ll take a while to post (especially because of the holidays), but that gives us all an opportunity to explore some of the ramifications before we settle into the details of how to implement.
Meanwhile, another special request: so far all the documentation I’ve found on modifying the player that encoder emits assumes that you will choose a Silverlight 1 version of the player and work in script. My example uses a Silverlight 2 player and work in C#. If you run across any examples or documentation of someone else doing that (modifying a Silverlight 2 player emitted from encoder) I’d love a link. Thanks!
Enjoy your holidays and stay tuned, much to come.
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