SMIL Validation (was RE: Captions for audio clips)

The W3C validator DOES validate SMIL ascii/text files.  I am anxious about 
how good a job it is doing.  I guess it should be great, since SMIL is a 
W3C spec.  I guess I don't quite understand why the CSS validator is 
separate from the main validation service, but SMIL is not.  Does it really 
test against the SMIL subset DTD specifications, or merely make sure that a 
file follows "general" XML specifications?  I was most disappointed to 
discover that the SMIL files from NCAM for the publicly available "Car" and 
"Elevator" do not validate as they are written.

My most immediately pressing SMIL problem is this:
Can a .smi (ascii/text) file reference (binary/media) files that are 
located on a different server?

I have tried using a BASE REF statement in the HEAD sections which seems to 
be ignored.
I have tried an explicit SRC statement like:
	<video src="http://38.201.92.250/ramgen/channels/able/car/carsilent.rm" 
region="videoregion"/>
But that just gets me an error message, "RealPlayer cannot play this type 
of document".
Removing the http:// (and a few other permutations I tried) results in 
other equally non-helpful error messages.

This question may belong in another group, but I need to know so I can 
experiment with live captions.

Bruce Bailey


On Monday, December 20, 1999 2:41 AM, Charles McCathieNevile 
[SMTP:charles@w3.org] wrote:
> SMIL doesn't provide for timing inside media objects - you can do that by
> breaking them into pieces and using explicit timing (that's what would be
> good to do). The W3C validator should now validate SMIL documents (well, 
XML
> in general in theory, and SMIL is XML).

Received on Monday, 20 December 1999 12:22:37 UTC