Kaz'hack

I’ve just been hired by INRIA to develop a Mozilla-based, multimedia-dedicated, web authoring tool. I’m working in a team that has been very active in the SVG and SMIL working groups and that has developed Amaya a while ago. After three months working here, I came up with two conclusions:

• the full SMIL spec (≠ SVG animations) is completely overkill for web browsers
• the SMIL/Timing module is magic: simple to use and offers a lot of cool features to web pages like timing, media synchronization and user interaction management. I wish this could be part of HTML5!

I’m currently working on a JavaScript implementation of the SMIL/Timing module. I’ve had the opportunity to give a lightning talk about this project at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, and I’ve made significant progress since.

Here’s a quick overview of SMIL/Timing and how we can use it in web pages. The full story and all the demos are on labs.kompozer.net/timesheets.

Timesheet Scheduler (Demo!)

I’ve started to implement the SMIL/Timing and SMIL/Timesheets specs in a JavaScript Timesheet Scheduler: with this small JS lib (less than 4KB for the minified/gzipped version), a lot of timing features and user interactions can be described without writing any specific JavaScript code. This can be easily used to design an slideshow like this one:

The full demo is available here: labs.kompozer.net/timesheets.