RE: SMIL DOM

> From: Kari Pihkala 
> 
> Hi all of you,
> 
> I wrote a SMIL player for an open source browser called X-Smiles. 

Yes, I think we all know of your work :-)

> It is written in Java and also has an implementation
> of SMIL DOM. I was faced with the same problem as you - no 
> proper specs for the SMIL DOM. So, I took the 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/smil-boston-dom/
> as the basis and extended it to support SMIL 2.0. However, I 
> only added the classes I needed - I didn't do any proper 
> implementation, because I realized that the general DOM 
> methods are mostly enough for scripting. So the SMIL DOM in 
> X-Smiles is not perfect. It also might have some of my own 
> methods, which should be removed. 

Are you saying that your SMIL DOM exists to serve the needs of the
player or the needs of script authoring, or both?
 
>If you have interest, we could try to develop a proper SMIL DOM 
> and perhaps submit it to W3C. What do you think?

In our application, again a GPL GNU/Linux video editor called Kino, we
have very specialized needs. We will not support scripting for a long
time. We are not overly concerned with strict compliance to the spec,
but we will strive to isolate our extensions to our own namespace. For
example, we need to persist rendered video files between editing
sessions and cross-reference them to their relevant transition. We
currently only support a document with sequential time containers
containing video media objects. Now that we have an effects renderer, we
need to extend this to support parallel time containers, nesting time
containers, basic and inline transitions, as well as more media objects.

I am not yet a very good OOP designer, and Kino is a hobby project with
part-time developers not interested in spending too much time on
architecture and design. So, you see, I am mostly looking at the
SMIL-Bostom DOM spec and X-Smiles Java for inspiration. Our
implementation is in C++. In the coming months I hope to gain a lot more
knowledge in order to contribute ideas to a new SMIL DOM spec.

+-DRD-+

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 11:21:40 UTC