timesheets.js

What’s The Point?

"Web Browsers Already Support SMIL"

No they don’t: modern web browsers (read: all except Internet Explorer) support declarative SVG Animations, which rely on the SMIL/BasicAnimation module — hence the (common) confusion.

Web browsers don’t support the full SMIL recommendation, and they don’t support SMIL/Timing either. That’s what this project is about.

"Why Don’t You Implement SMIL Instead?"

The SMIL spec is huge, it includes a specific box-model which is very far from the HTML/CSS one, and it’s only partially implemented by a few media players. It might be possible to implement SMIL in modern web browsers, too, but we think it would be inadequate:

• web authors would have to learn SMIL, which is much more difficult to use than HTML
• we don’t want to include a SMIL section in a web page: we want to control the timing of the whole web page!
• HTML5 and CSS3 are already fine to describe the content and layout; all we need is a standard, declarative timing language.

SMIL has been designed for advanced synchronization tasks. Some SMIL aspects have already been ported to web standards (e.g. SVG animations and CSS transitions), our project is about porting SMIL/Timing and Timesheets to web documents.

"I Can Already Do That With Flash/JavaScript"

That’s right. And you can still use JavaScript to get some rollover effects if you don’t want to use the CSS :hover pseudo-class. ;-)

The point is precisely to use a declarative language for all the common tasks that currently require JavaScript development:

• that’s much easier for web authors (and for web authoring tool developers);
• that’s a much better way to achieve a good accessibility / indexability;
• that’s easier to maintain, since no specific JavaScript code is used.

As this declarative language is (almost) standard, web browsers could implement it eventually. Until then, we’ll provide a free, generic, JavaScript implementation.

"IE<9 Supports HTML+Time And Nobody Cares"

True: Microsoft started supporting HTML+TIME ten years ago with IE 5.5; but without SVG, <audio|video> elements and CSS transitions, there hasn’t been many real-life use cases so far.

We think it’s more than time to bring a modern, standard equivalent of HTML+Time to the web. Especially for multimedia-related tasks.