Re: Fwd: [xml-dev] SMIL markup

Lloyd.Rutledge@cwi.nl (Lloyd Rutledge) writes:
>I hope this gives you enough answers (and enough to do ;),

No, I'm afraid it doesn't, but given the nature of your answers, I don't
think this conversation is worth pursuing.

My simple application is stop-motion animation using graphics with
captions and some sound, typically MP3 and MIDI.

I don't need all the capabilities of XHTML+SMIL, nor do I find promoting
the now-frozen forever-incomplete XHTML+SMIL capabilities of Internet
Explorer a worthwhile activity.  If I'm going to actually be working
with SMIL, my primary viewer is going to be RealPlayer One - partly
because it's widely distributed, partly because it supports MIDI, and
partly because there's hope for further development with Real's
releasing their SMIL support as open source in Helix.

Otherwise, it looks like I'm stuck waiting for SVG to absorb all the
parts of SMIL I find useful, and hoping that MIDI finds support in an
SVG player someday.

Proclaiming that "SMIL is a meta-language, so this isn't our problem"
doesn't satisfy me at all.  The URL hack for handling text goes back to
SMIL 1.0, before visions of meta-languages took over, and it is still an
enormous wart.  I can understand that the committee can't be bothered to
fix it when SMIL has apparently moved on to other things, but this is
ducking, not fixing.

>Thus, if you are interested in actively promoting
>text as element content in SMIL, I suggest you campaign for promotion
>of XHTML+SMIL (or an equivalent) to Recommendation so that SMIL text
>content becomes official. 

I'd rather just have something small that works.  XHTML+SMIL is huge,
and there's not a whole lot of evidence that the world is calling for
it.  I'm not - I just find one tiny piece of SMIL, though an important
one, to be broken.  Please don't offer me a concrete mixer when I'm
looking for a bit of plaster.

>Take a look at the Timed Text W3C effort as well
>(http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/TT/).  This group is working on,
>basically, timed captions and subtitles for inclusion in SMIL
>presentation.  Perhaps you could get involved in this group and
>promote direct inclusion of such text.

Again, this misses my point nearly entirely.  I'd like to be able to
work with text in a natural (<text>This is text.</text>) way within SMIL
documents without piling on ever more specifications which never quite
get implemented fully.  Timed Text looks just a tiny bit better than
putting the captions in separate files, and that's not nearly enough
better to be interesting to me.

There's no need to continue defending SMIL - at this point, I'm not
going to worry about it, as I have my hacks working, and you seem to
deny consistently that this is an issue at all.  Doesn't make for a
great conversation.

Received on Monday, 25 August 2003 07:27:06 UTC