(X)HTML + CSS + SMIL and alternative style sheets.

   I'm not clear on how SMIL is supposed to be used in a context where
it is supposed to be part of the presentation of an XHTML page. As I
browse through the SMIL 2.1 spec, it looks to me like the markup is
supposed to be inline with the XHTML content. Yet, that's a violation of
separation of presentation and content. Ideally, we'd want all
presentation to be in the style sheet, especially in situations with
alternative style sheets, where you may want animations and other
effects that are specific to the styling.

   What's worse is the fact that it doesn't even seem possible for plain
HTML to use SMIL. Therefore, if XHTML is served as "text/html", I
believe that SMIL would just be ignored.

   Is sXBL/XBL2 supposed to fix these problems by allowing external SMIL
documents to be bound to the document via a style sheet? How is a web
author supposed to do style-specific animations and effects using SMIL?
Or is the solution just to use XHTML with a single style sheet?

Received on Tuesday, 27 September 2005 19:26:54 UTC