Position Paper for Workshop on "Television and the Web"

Since 1995 ACCESS has been developing WWW browsers for TV sets and other consumer electronics and now NetFront ver. 2.0 works on many different platforms and adopt up-to-date internet technologies such as JAVA and SSL. As for browsers for TV sets, however, it is hard to say that they achieved a great success so far. Following issues are outstanding for Web on TV to evolve.

• Easy navigation by remote control

  It is difficult for browser software to arrange links which are spread ove= r a Web page for users to navigate easily, especially when the page is formatted two-dimensionally using tables or layers. We think some rules f= or describing focus movement in TV-specific HTML is necessary. TABORDER and ACCESSKEY attributes are insufficie= nt. Moreover, guidelines for TV-Web like Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines may be indispensable.

• Limited hardware resource vs. rich contents

  Page description languages and related technologies become more complex. These specifications are developed on the assumption that they work on state-of-the-art PC's. Specifications for TV-Web must be balanced the expressiveness with the complexity.

• Better integration of TV content and Web content

  Internet capable TV currently works as TV and as browser separately. There is no relation between them. For these two functions to work together, description languages like SMIL will play an important role in the near future. It is important to consider the characteristic of TV mentioned above when developing these specifications.

Norio Kimura, ACCESS Co.,Ltd.