Hello mathog,
Monday, December 2, 2013, 6:29:44 PM, you wrote:
Sorry to be dense, but ...
SMIL is multimedia - any kind of multimedia, including still images, sound, and animation, and transitions between any of these.
Yes, it is. Two parts of that, SMIL animation and SMIL Timing, were integrated into SVG 1.0 and are used in SVG independent of all the other parts of SMIL.
Inkscape is a 2D drawing program that among other things renders SVG.
Well, it is a 2D drawing program that uses a superset of SVG as its native format (which is a big difference from some other format which is merely exported on demand).
What are you all trying to accomplish here? Is the goal to get Inkscape to render SMIL, complete with fades, sounds, and embedded movies,
No
or is it to make Inkscape more SMIL friendly, so that it can be used from within SMIL to render those sorts of objects it already supports?
No
Or something else entirely?
Something else entirely - supporting the SVG use of SMIL animation and timing which has been in SVG ever since version 1.0 in 1998.
However, for Inkscape to do anything much with SMIL it would seem like it would have to go from (x,y) to (x,y,t) for pretty much every visible object, and that seems like a pretty major change to make for what may be a niche application.
It is indeed a fairly major change. Its certainly not niche. Outside of print, interactive dynamic vector graphics are just as common as static ones. The lack of a good visual authoring tool for creating animated SVG is frequently cited as a major drawback.