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SMIL compiles again

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Today is the Queen’s birthday public holiday in Australia. In Sydney the weather is freezing and the surf is huge. All this means I’ve finally got my SMIL work to compile against the trunk again. Now to get it working again!

Thanks to the many people who have left very encouraging comments in the meantime. I’ll do my best to get this up and running as soon as possible. One very experienced developer has suggested they might be able to contribute which would really help bring this to reality.

I’ll wait until it’s actually working (and I’ve done some more deCOMtamination) before posting another patch. But thanks for being patient with me!

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Comments

Tangui

Great :)

Rob

Can’t wait - just spent last week reworking some SMIL into javascript animation.

Matt Platte
Matt Platte・

Good to see that there’s still some spark in SMIL. Most of what I’ve found is five years old; lessee, how long is that in Internet years…?

Sorry I’m not able to help with the actual programming bit, but if you need another pair of eyes for something else, well holler.

I’m working on a kiosk project that, for now anyway, is a Windows project and with IE more-or-less supporting SMIL, it seems like a good idea. I like that the text and media aren’t being crammed into an .swf file or whatever the Revolution folks use, etc. Let the data be free and all of that.

Carry on!

Brian

Thanks Matt!

There’ll certainly be a need for help with testing — hopefully soon too. But I’m afraid SMIL in HTML is a fair way off — if ever. I’m just focussing on SVG. Hopefully the approach I’ve taken will mean that it’s not difficult to integrate it with HTML too. That would depend at least in part on someone stepping forward to do it.

Thanks again Matt!

Brian.

Justin Clift

Heh Heh Heh

We’re both learning as we go. :)

Today’s learning thing for me was pauseAnimations() and unpauseAnimations(). Needless to say I’m working on a control bar (and it’s elements) for the SVG that Flame generates.

Over 2k downloads of Flame so far, just of dev snapshots. Not bad for just the very beginning I’m thinking… wonder how many there are of Moz SVG nightlies? (expecting a Lot more than that)

Btw - Keep going, you’re making a positive difference. :)

+ Justin

Brian

Thanks Justin!

I’ve made a bit of progress in the last few days. Hopefully getting closer to something for reviewing.

I’ll have to give Flame a spin tonight — might be able to use it in an upcoming demo. Thanks again!

Brian.

Justin Clift

Heh Heh Heh

Well, the whole control/playback part for svg export in Flame is still not very usable. Very busy at work and didn’t have time for a few days.

But! Tonight I put aside some time and kept working on the control bar code (very boring!) and it’s progressing, needs a bunch more hours still.

Probably try the dev snapshot released next Sunday/Monday, it’ll likely have working control bar code, which will improve the experience from svg playback!

btw, try not to output resolutions greater than about 320x200 or 640x480 for Firefox, as FF seems to have semi-broken svg image handling code and just won’t display embedded svg images bigger than that.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Rui

hi brian,

I’ve recently found this blog, when searching for SMIL support for gecko-based engines. It’s a project I’ve always wanted to do but, unfortunately, a day only has 24 hours ;)

My research areas are related to time-based hypermedia and, therefore, here and there I code some smil stuff (actually html+time, since pure smil is bad). I’ve always wanted to have the pure xhtml+smil+svg+mathml+*ml stuff on gecko-based browsers (mozilla and firefox), and seeing that you’re working on the smil bit, I smiled automatically (pun intended) :)

A question that I have, after reading some of your posts is: your work is geared towards an independent smil module for gecko our is is somehow tied to svg stuff?

I’m looking forward to see it on gecko’s main trunk and released, let’s say, in firefox 3.0? ;) I’ll try to have some spare hours per month and try to work with you on some coding.

Thanks,

Rui

Brian

Hi Rui!

Great to hear from you. I’ve arranged the code into a separate SMIL module. It is initially intended for use with SVG but it is written in such a way that there are no dependencies from the SMIL module on SVG.

So I expect it would be possible for someone to later implement XHTML+SMIL using this code.

Any help with development will be greatly appreciated. I’m working on getting my initial patch ready for review so others can extend it.

Thanks again!

Brian.

Justin Clift

Ok, the new release of Flame should be ready to try now if you’re using Windows (not sure):

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=435595

I’ll have to get around to making packages for Linux, as the Linux version has more functionality (screen capturing, etc). ;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

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