Textual authoring of interactive digital TV applications

Abstract

Authoring tools for hypermedia languages usually provide visual abstractions, which hide the source code from the author aiming to simplify and accelerate the development process. Among other drawbacks, these abstractions modify or even break the communication process between the author and the language designer, since these languages were designed to be readable and understandable by its target audience. This paper presents a textual approach to hypermedia authoring that does not have these inconveniences, but rather uses typographical accessories, such as program visualization, hypertextual navigation, and semiautomatic error correction. The proposed approach exploits concepts known to the author and does not imply in extra cognitive overload. A use case is presented, namely the NCL Eclipse authoring environment, for Nested Context Language, the Brazilian Digital TV and ITU-T standard.

Incremental validation of NCL hypermedia documents

“…It used Real-Time Synchronization Model (RTSM) as internal data model. SMIL Builder [19] is another authoring tool that does not use XML Schema and performs incremental validation on SMIL documents (in the next section this tool is described in more details). Because of the XML Schema limitation on describing some NCL features, our approach also does not use it and defines a proper metalanguage to describe NCL.…”

“…In the context of authoring, the SMIL Builder [19] is an example of tool that performs incremental check in order to verify the temporal consistence of SMIL documents. Like NCL, SMIL is a hypermedia language focused on the definition of synchronism relations among media composing the application.…”

On the Challenges of Using Large Language Models for NCL Code Generation

“…Authoring tools [3,6,11,12,18,21,23,25,26] have been the subject of extensive study when addressing the development of applications in NCL (Nested Context Language), the declarative language for developing interactive applications for the Brazilian Digital TV and ITU-T IPTV systems.…”

NuGinga Playcode: A web NCL/NCLua authoring tool for Ginga-NCL digital TV applications

“…The platform runs entirely on the browser, compiling the application on the client side, therefore it can run regardless of internet connection. Regarding Ginga-NCL development, the NCL Eclipse [12] is a plugin to Eclipse IDE [4] that validates if NCL code is in compliance with the ABNT standard and provides a Ginga-NCL Emulator to test code. The main feature gap of NCL Eclipse plugin is that it does not have support to NCLua code, and it only works with NCL code.…”