Re: Comments on "Web Forms 2.0"

* Ian Hickson wrote:
>Can SMIL address DOM attributes separately from content attributes? Can it 
>treat attributes as strings yet still do numeric manipulation on them? 
>(e.g. to increase a "title" attribute's value from "0" to "100".)

SMIL 2.1 does not include features for the former; the latter depends on
the markup specification, you can do it, but you probably would not de-
fine it this way.

>What is the simplest answer here? Since some of the attributes have 
>different types at different times it seems like it might be best to just 
>say that they are all strings; is that possible?

I'd go through the attributes in the draft and decide for each whether
it makes sense to allow animation of it. If animation of the input name
attribute does not change the name of the control then it probably does
not make sense to allow animation of it, for example. MSIE allows e.g.
animation of the input size and textarea cols/rows attributes and does
not allow animation of the input type and input value attributes (i.e.,
doing that has no observable effect).

The remaining attributes (if any) would fall into two categories, some
have a conceptually n-dimensional value space and some don't. For those
without, animation is discrete, non-additive (you treat them as strings)
and you are done. For the others it should be specified whether the
animation can be additive (how do concurrent animations interact),
cumulative (if the animation repeats, does the new iteration replace or
add to the results of the previous iteration), and how to do
interpolation...

You could make it possible for example to have an animation that adds
one second to a <input type="time" min="..."> attribute every second;
not unreasonable if the user must pick a value between "now" and a
specific date :-) Of course, I don't know whether the min attribute
should be animatable...

A simple approach for these remaining attributes (if any) would be to
define whatever MSIE does...

>Does SMIL define how animation interacts with these DOM Core features?

http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-SMIL2-20050107/animation.html#animationNS-AnimationSandwichModel

>I couldn't really see answers to any of your questions in those documents, 
>unfortunately. They mostly seem to be about how to add SMIL attributes and 
>elements to HTML.

One thing they define is for which attributes animation is allowed.
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Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2005 06:46:16 UTC