SMIL 3.0 initial comments

My comments on SMIL 3.0 follow. Document location is:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/

Intro: SMIL 3.0 is an extensive spec. However, it is built upon SMIL 
2.1. I focused on new items of interest to our WG.

The main items of interest are the new elements smilText, as well as 
changes to layout and content.

We begin with smilText, located here:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-text.html

1. smilText does not define the xml:lang attribute. Thus there is no way 
to indicate the language of a piece of text. This is a significant 
limitation, since many rendering, text processing, and text selection 
applications depend on language identification. Please add the xml:lang 
attribute.

2. smilText defines the attribute 'textWrapOption'. No indication is 
given as to how text wrapping works. In particular, the breaking options 
don't match the more mature ones that appear in CSS3 (see: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-css3-text-20070306/#text-wrap)

3. The textAlign attribute defines a number of values (start, end, left, 
right, center) that assume left-to-right text progression. While 'left' 
and 'right' seem obvious, start and end should depend on text direction 
(which can be set by textDirection).

4. (non-i18n) The default colors for both textColor and 
textBackgroundColor is "transparent"??

5. textFontFamily doesn't define specific font names, only virtual 
fonts, which seems limiting.

6. textMode append: some languages do not uses spaces between words, 
while others do. We assume that append does not imply a space 
automatically being appended. Best to say this somewhere?

7. There is no way to deal with vertical text with the various 
layout/styling options?

8. For text motion, textMode looks okay, except, again, it assumes no 
vertical text.

In: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-content.html#adef-systemLanguage

9. "systemLanguage" is defined in terms of RFC 1766, which has been 
obsolete for quite awhile. BCP 47 is the correct reference and the 
current RFC is RFC 4646.

10. The "systemLanguage" element's matching algorithm doesn't deal with 
case sensitivity properly. It should refer to RFC 4647 Basic Filtering.

11. In the switch element, the example for systemLanguage doesn't 
mention matching, only exact tag matching. Probably good to remind folks 
here. Other following examples also only use simple language tags. Maybe 
use some Traditional vs. Simplified Chinese examples?

In: http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-layout.html#edef-layout

12. The "region" element defines top/bottom/left/right. This might not 
be best for bidi documents? There is no way to override document 
directionality at the layout level, only at the text item level 
(inconvenient??)



-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2007 03:28:42 UTC