Re: (X)HTML5 + SMIL?

Regarding HTML5, i think that interoperability may be a difficult road to
hoe, especially if there's only one or two people advocating for it.

If i were to put together a proposal (and i'd like to), i would ideally like
to have usecases for where SMIL is being used now, what usecases HTML5
support would enable developers/users to do, and examples of things people
are putting together to get around a lack of support in browsers as it
stands (e.g. fake smile).

This is all info that needs to be gathered from the SMIL community.  So if
you have examples, i would love to hear about them.

I'm aware of some places where SMIL is used, i know that Hulu uses the
standard to serve to their player, the CDN Highwinds uses SMIL for content
delivery, and the company i work for uses SMIL to dynamically
generate/customize presentations to deliver to users (also to our player).
There's the SMIL subset in SVG that developers can use to enable animation
(i'm hacking up a demo of that too, although there are already several out
there, if you spend a tedious amount of time looking for them).  I'm aware
vaguely that advertising agencies use the standard, but not in any specific
way.

I can draft up cool examples of what SMIL allows people to do and perhaps
hack up some demos, but that isn't the same as having real world examples!

Cheers,

-Ted

P.S. the flipside to all of this is justifying why SMIL may be a better
match than alternatives like just using HTML5+JS, or CSS Animations.  I have
justifications for why SMIL is more useful than HTML5+JS (being that it's
declarative and doesn't open up a cross site scripting hole just by it's
very use), but i need to learn more about CSS animations before i can put
together a coherent argument on that count.

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Greg Herlein <gherlein@herlein.com> wrote:

> I'd like to know why there has been such slow adoption of SMIL.  For
> me, the problem it solves is that it allows temporal definition in the
> markup language.  The graphical folks grok HTML, but they are not
> going to grok learning JS to make elements appear together, or appear
> in certain sequences at presrived times or in response to certain
> events (clicks, etc).  SMIL defines all of that, yet desptie my
> deamnds for it commercially (I am Dir Engineering for the largest
> retail advertising digital signage company in the world) only a few
> companies have anything that supports it.
>
> I'd love to use the momentum of HTML5 to get more merge.  How can I
> exert influence?  What tasks need to be done on the Engineering side?
> How do we all push this forwrd to obtain the *value* of a standard
> (because unless it's adopted it's a standard of no worth to the
> market).
>
> --------------------------------
> Greg Herlein
> Mobile:  415-368-7546
> Web:      blog.herlein.com
> twitter:  @gherlein
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 7:01 AM, Ted Han <ted@knowtheory.net> wrote:
> > Thanks David :)  I've run across fakesmil before, but i haven't poked
> around
> > your source yet, i'll just do that now.
> > I'm curious what your experience implementing this in JS has been,
> whether
> > there are particular performance issues you've encountered, or things
> that
> > were particularly difficult that you may have had to hack around or
> > anything?
> > Cheers,
> > -Ted
> > On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:26 AM, David Leunen <leunen.d@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> if anyone has interest in trying to develop a JS based SMIL player.
> >>
> >> I've developed a little JS script that implements most of the animation
> >> module (works with SVG and XHTML) + Timesheets.
> >>
> >> http://leunen.d.free.fr/fakesmile/
> >> It's not complete, but Jeff used to use it successfully on his blog.
> >
> >
>