NCL4WEB: translating NCL applications to HTML5 web pages

  • Authors:

  • Esdras Caleb Oliveira Silva;Joel A. F. dos Santos;Débora C. Muchaluat-Saade

  • Affiliations:

  • Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Document engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Testing Digital TV applications is not a simple task. DTV applications either need to be transmitted by a TV broadcaster or someone with an equipment capable of generating a DTV signal with the application embedded. Alternatively, an interactive TV application developer may use a virtual execution environment, like a virtual set-top box installed in a computer, which implements the digital TV middleware standard. In both cases, the application usually does not reach a large number of final users, and developers may not be motivated to continue working with digital TV interactive content. On the other hand, HTML5 support for multimedia content will certainly attract multimedia authors to web development. Considering this scenario, this work proposes an alternative way of presenting a digital TV application developed in NCL for the Ginga declarative middleware, translating it into HTML5 web pages, so it can be presented using a common web browser. The translation tool is called NCL4WEB. Like HTML, NCL is XML-based, so NCL4WEB is based on XSLT stylesheets. It transforms NCL elements into HTML5 elements and a set of JavaScript functions that implement synchronization relationships among media objects, including user interaction. Using NCL4WEB, NCL developers are able to publish their interactive TV applications on the web. It is transparent for final users to access HTML5 or NCL content using a web browser.