A presentation language for controlling the formatting process in multimedia presentations

Multimedia information encapsulated inside documents is more and more specific because its content is specified using domain vocabularies. Their integration in space and time to form a document implies transformation steps to produce "presentation structures".In this context presentation languages and formatters must be enhanced to cover new needs of rendering such as: multiple output of the same information or dynamic changing of the reader context. These new document models and processing architectures induce new editing and formatting services to be proposed to the author.This paper describes new presentation properties that can be added to existing presentation languages and that allow the author to express: priorities, more abstract properties and fall-back positions. These properties are used by our formatter in order to provide more adaptive renderings. The architecture of this formatting service is open in order to be used for different presentation systems with different presentation languages. In this paper, we describe our experiment using priorities and optimization requests for temporal formatting.