(X)HTML5 + SMIL?

Hey everybody,

I've been touring the internet to find out how SMIL is getting used and what
it's been through in the past, and happened upon the HTML5 draft spec's
media components.  I was somewhat alarmed to note that issue-10 (
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/10 ) was closed w/o prejudice by
the HTML WG due to lack of contact from the SYMM WG (and also that the issue
has been open for 3 years).

I dropped into #whatwg on irc.freenode.org to find out what the deal was,
and Maciej Stachowiak and Ian Hickson both stated that they'd be willing to
open the issue again if a proposal appeared (and preferably a bug report),
but that at this point they'd need some strong justification for why
coordination w/ SMIL would be a good idea.  What i'm curious about is what
level of interest there is within the SYMM WG to see if there is a
possibility of coordinating between the two standards.

I am aware that the SYMM WG produced a note back in 2002 for XHTML+SMIL (
http://www.w3.org/TR/XHTMLplusSMIL/ ), however i don't actually know to what
degree the SYMM WG is interested in integration targets like XHTML5.  It
would be useful to know!

What HTML5 supports is particularly relevant if anyone has interest in
trying to develop a JS based SMIL player.  It'd be ideal if there was a
common basis for media types (since a lot of the timing and layout stuff
could possibly be bootstrapped off of that base).  So my initial question is
if there's a way to get HTML5 to coordinate with something like SMIL3Tiny
(provide the media types), and see whether it's possible to bootstrap off of
that.

Cheers,

-Ted