W3C Workshop on Web applications and compound documents, June 2004.
By Peter Stark, Web applications, Sony EricssonSony Ericsson mobile phones supports XHTML, SMIL, and SVG. Today these technologies are supported by separate applications - the browser, the MMS client, and the SVG player - to handle different use cases - Web pages, MMS messages, and animations. We expect the situation where the technologies are separated into different applications will soon change, as the need to create graphics-based pages arise.
Our customers want to create graphics-based Web pages with multimedia, that cannot be done with the text-based XHTML and CSS technologies - there are limits to how much can be done with styled text and inline images. In 2004 we expect SVG images to be used as graphics-based Web pages in the browser, and somewhat take over from XHTML/CSS. We expect that SMIL can be used to present pictures on a Web album, in addition to being the multimedia format for MMS. More and more use cases suggest to us that XHTML, SMIL, and SVG must co-exist in order to provide graphics-based Web pages with multimedia.
Compound documents, mixed language documents, is nothing new - you can have both CSS and ECMAScript in an XHTML document. When SMIL and SVG are brought into the family of core Web languages, used to create graphics-based Web pages together with XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript, how the languages are mixed in one document must be defined. Otherwise, there will no interoperability.
XHTML and SVG are used in mobile phones because well-defined mobile profiles for these technologies exist - XHTML Basic and SVG Tiny. Without a clear definition of how CSS and ECMAScript is used in an XHTML document, there would have been no interoperability. Well defined profiles are required for interoperability.