SMIL

Is SMIL dead? It seems that SVG could be enhanced by SMIL - perhaps
solving some of the problems that have been currently discussed.

One idea to borrow from SMIL would be access to element attributes.
This would enable alignment such as this (to borrow a previously discussed
example):

<text x="10%" y="10%">The <tspan id="cat">cat</tspan> sat on the <tspan
id="mat">mat</tspan>.</text>
<image x="cat.x" xlink:href="cat.jpg"/>
<image x="mat.x" xlink:href="mat.jpg"/>

Hopefully, when font size changes, so will the X coordinates for the tspan
elements.
Theoretically, you could access the font height as well, for vertical
alignment. However,
you'd have to know if text is rendered under or over the line.

Other useful elements would be region and layout.

Apparently, SMIL supports SVG as a media type - although I haven't been able
to
use SMIL for media other than Windows media in IE6. Microsoft seems to only
support
some SMIL elements - and not fully. Additionally, they only seem to support
SMIL in
play lists.

Any thoughts? Would this benefit anyone else?

Received on Friday, 9 July 2004 11:25:57 UTC