Re: HTML forms

["James P. Salsman" <bovik at best.com>]

David,

Thanks for your message:

> Given a microphone capturing application that can
> capture a spoken phrase to a named file, the current
> HTML file upload form element is sufficient to upload
> that voice clip.

That is absolutly right, and it captures the essense of 
why the W3C should take an affirmative stance to 
standardize microphone upload.  Suppose you are developing 
a spoken language instruction system using asyncronous 
audio conferencing.  If you wanted to provide for students 
on several different platforms, you would have to provide 
a microphone capture application for each of them.  Then,
when the participants used your system, they would have 
to record, save to a file, select that file, and upload it 
as seperate operations, switching between the browser and 
microphone capture application each time.  If microphone 
upload were standardized, I estimate that it would save 
over ten mouse and key-clicks per upload, without having 
to distribute a supplemental application for each platform.

> MIME e-mail can carry voice clips and comments between
> teacher and student perfectly well.

Only a few mail user agents provide that capability.  Back 
in late 1996 some language instructors on one of the distance 
education lists (DEOS?) or newsgroups were claiming that 
voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least 
for some students.

> Streaming microphone data as something which would be part
> of a standard...

The device upload spec isn't for streaming, it uses only 
TCP-based HTTP POST enctype="multipart/form-data" HTML form 
submissions; see:
  http://www.bovik.org/device-upload.html

Cheers,
James