- From: Ted Han <ted@knowtheory.net>
- Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 08:12:39 -0500
- To: www-smil@w3.org
- Message-ID: <8b5109ac1002090512v1a619f6co3953114af0c98c14@mail.gmail.com>
Hey Folks, I have sunk myself into the endeavor of trying to produce summaries of the standard (for my own use, and for others). My goal is to produce these summaries programmatically from the standards document itself, given that it's validating HTML, and the normative reference. I've been able to interrogate the document for some information, but i am dismayed to find that the large bulk of the useful information that one could glean from the document, is unextractable, due to semantic inconsistencies in the standard's markup. My immediate goal is to produce a quick reference for SMIL elements and their applicable attributes (again directly from the Standard). I am aware that the SMIL 3.0 reference book has attribute references for all the elements, but, unfortunately, as a book, it's awfully difficult to share and/or search the content therein, and casual users of SMIL may not be interested in purchasing the reference (nor does purchasing books travel at the speed of the internet). At this point, i'm some what resigned to the fact that it will be impossible to pull all of the vital information from the current standard programmatically (although if anyone has suggestions i would be very interested in hearing them), but i still think it is worthwhile to point out the inconsistencies, so that they might be rectified in future versions of the Standard. That said, i don't know what the likelihood, such changes would be adopted, or by what process such changes should be offered. If anyone could clue me in i'd be quite grateful. Any generally help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! -Ted To provide some examples, (disregarding typos in normative sections of the document, like Table 1 of section 2.4), there's a variety of inconsistencies between how element and attribute definitions are marked up. Depending on the section, attributes may or may not be contained within a dl or div with the class "adef-list" or "attdef-list" applied. Element definitions are labeled with the "edef" class, but unfortunately, all of the table of contents links to these sections are also inexplicably labeled with the "edef" class. Additionally, none of these elements, attributes or lists are contained with in divs that indicate what section they belong to, so one must take the leap of faith that the preceding h2 element accurately indicates the section to which the element(s) or attribute(s) belongs.
Received on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 13:13:12 UTC