I am writing this position paper to participate in the June 1 and 2 Compound Document Workshop to represent ACCESS, Co. Ltd.
ACCESS is one of the world’s leading suppliers of embedded web browsers. Our browser, NetFront, is on over 200 individual products and over 100 million individual seats. We have deployed browsers on PDAs, cellphones, set-top boxes, kiosks, cameras, fax machines, wristwatches and pretty much any device with a visual display. We supply the browser bundled with Palm OS, and supply the browsers for most of DoCoMo’s successful iMode service.
Clearly, as one of the top suppliers of mobile and embedded web browsers, we have a strong interest in understanding how markup languages are evolving. Compound documents are an area that we see as an exciting opportunity to bring even additional rendering power to the web browser.
Compound document discussions tend to mention the same set of markup languages: XHTML, SMIL, SVG, and VoiceXML. In fact, ACCESS has implementations in all of these areas. It is a natural evolution to consider compounding these individual markups into a single document.
For SMIL, ACCESS has been active in the recent restart of the SYMM WG activity. We are particularly interested in the SMIL 2.1 specification. Our browser currently implements SMIL and we are a supplier to KDDI, the world’s leading mobile SMIL service.
For SVG, we implement SVG as a plug-in to NetFront. Please see the announcement on the W3C SVG website.
For VoiceXML, we are one of two implementations for the XHTML+VoiceXML (X+V) specification and are members of the MultiModal Interaction Working Group. X+V, the integration of XHTML plus VoiceXML, is clearly of importance as a model to understand additional compound markups such as XSS.
And, we of course implement XHTML.
ACCESS is particularly active in the mobile and embedded domain where heavy computation power is not always available.
At this point, we do not have strong optinions to share. However, we are of course anxious to participate to help influence the direction of tomorrow’s standards.
In reference to this question:
We believe the answer is yes. There should be support for predefined profiles such as for mobile browsers. However, it must be recognized that mobile browsers are rapidly growing in functionality and therefore the mobile profiles must evolve accordingly.