On Mar 12, 2008, at 8:58 AM, Christophe Dehais wrote:

Indeed the timeline UI in itself is quite some work I guess. Maybe

just implementing the motion path on-canvas helper with onion skinning

simulation could be more reasonable for this period of time.

Now that I think of it, it would have helped me to have an LPE editing mockup before I started. (more precise than what I had in my head) So perhaps you should (like you already did) start gsoc with as precise a UI description as possible. (for example also, who writes to XML, what will be written to XML, which XML changes should trigger an update of which widgets, etc...

That's seem a good plan of action. I'd like to avoid proposing

something that turns out to be a dead-end for future improvements

(toward full SMIL compliance), So a careful analysis is definitely

good. And making mockups would help getting feedback from

animation-aware users.

Also if you're looking at a solid back-end, remember that there are *two* main ways to do animation in SVG. There is the declarative SMIL style animation, but then there is also animation driven by scripting such as Javascript. It's also very possible to mix the two. Also given that Bob has gotten some big jumps in scripting and DOM coming along, there is a higher chance of needed internals being there. Also for web browsers the scripting route, or at least supplementing with scripting, is a very common one.