SMIL 3.0 Candidate Recommendation

The W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group has posted the candidate recommendation of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language 3.0 (SMIL 3.0). SMIL 3.0 has four goals:

• Define an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL, an author can describe the temporal behaviour of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen.


• Extend the functionalities contained in the SMIL 2.1 into new or revised SMIL 3.0 modules.


• Allow reusing of SMIL syntax and semantics in other XML-based languages, in particular those who need to represent timing and synchronization. For example, SMIL components are used for integrating timing into XHTML and into SVG.


• Define new SMIL 3.0 Profiles incorporating features useful within the industry.

Source - cafeconleche.org

Saxon 9.0.0.3 Released

Michael Kay has released version 9.0.0.3 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor for Java and .NET. This is a bug fix release. This is a "Maintenance Release clearing all known bugs up to 18 Jan 2008."

Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later (or .NET) is required. Saxon 9.0B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0 that "implements the 'basic' conformance level for XSLT 2.0 and XQuery."

Saxon 9.0 SA is a ?250.00 payware version that "allows stylesheets and queries to import an XML Schema, to validate input and output trees against a schema, and to select elements and attributes based on their schema-defined type. Saxon-SA also incorporates a free-standard XML Schema validator.

In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions not available in the Saxon-B product. These include a try/catch capability for catching dynamic errors, improved error diagnostics, support for higher-order functions, and additional facilities in XQuery including support for grouping, advanced regular expression analysis, and formatting of dates and numbers."

Source - cafeconleche.org

Scalable Vector Graphics SVG Tiny 1.2 Specification

Scalable Vector Graphics Specification defines the features and syntax for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Tiny, Version 1.2 - a modularized language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML.

SVG Tiny 1.2 is the baseline profile of SVG, implementable on a range of SVG enabled devices: from mobile devices like cellphones and PDAs to desktop and laptop computers, and is the core of SVG 1.2. Other SVG 1.2 specifications will extend this functionality to form supersets.