Behavioral reactivity and real time programming in XML: functional programming meets SMIL animation

  • Authors:

  • Peter King;Patrick Schmitz;Simon Thompson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada;Ludicrum Enterprises, San Francisco, CA;University of Kent, Canterbury Kent, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Document engineering
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

XML and its associated languages are emerging as powerful authoring tools for multimedia and hypermedia web content. Furthermore intelligent presentation generation engines have begun to appear as have models and platforms for adaptive presentations. However XML-based models are limited by their lack of expressiveness in presentation and animation. As a result authors of dynamic adaptive web content must often use considerable amounts of script or code. The use of such script or code has two serious drawbacks. First such code undermines the declarative description possible in the original presentation language and second the scripting/coding approach does not readily lend itself to authoring by non programmers. In this paper we describe a set of XML language extensions inspired by features from the functional programming world which are designed to widen the class of reactive systems which could be described in languages such as SMIL. The described features extend the power of declarative modeling for the web by allowing the introduction of web media items which may dynamically react to continuously varying inputs both in a continuous way and by triggering discrete user-defined events. The two extensions described herein are discussed in the context of SMIL Animation and SVG but could be applied to many XML-based languages.