RE: SMIL

Hi, James-

I am also very interested in integrating more SMIL and declarative options
in general into SVG. I don't think that it is appropriate for this to be
talked about for the SVG1.2 scope, since all of us want the new Spec
finalized and approved, but I have thought of a set of features that I think
would be great to have in SVG1.3 or 2.0. I am in the process of writing up
an informal proposal for these features, integrating thoughts from many
conversations I've had with other people in the SVG and XForms communities,
and some of my own ideas (you will be able to tell the difference: if it
came from someone else, it makes sense ;). I have even tried to create
JavaScript emulations (to greater or lesser success) as test cases. 

I call my grab-bag set of features Behavior and Appearance Markup (BAM). You
can view my very rough draft at:

http://www.schepers.cc/BAM/

Please ignore the fact that it "coincidentally" looks like a W3C page...
that was just a little joke on my part. This is in no way affiliated with
the W3C, nor is it a formal proposal.

I am still exploring what can, should, and might be useful to intergate into
this scheme, and any use cases, tests, criticisms, or especially new
concepts would be very welcome and credited accordingly. Note that this is a
public domain document, though, so anything that you say that seems cool to
me will go into it; be warned, with regards to proprietary technology.

For the record, I think that there are many people interested in this same
problem space... While I haven't read their documents, the WHAT-WG people
are trying to do some basically similar things with HTML and CSS, and I'm
sure they have some interesting ideas as well.

Regards-
-Doug


James Bentley wrote:
| 
| 
| 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? 

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Received on Friday, 9 July 2004 17:35:38 UTC