Re: New developers looking for a place to join in

On Jan 22, 1:06 am, Jonathan Watt <[email protected]> wrote:
> As you may know, Brian Britles, Daniel Holbert, Robert O'Callahan and others
> have managed to get initial support for SMIL landed just recently. There's still
> plenty of work (sub-features) to do though, and we'd like to get the support as
> feature complete and bug free as possible before it's released in Firefox 3.2
> (or whatever the release after 3.1 is). I've asked Brian and Daniel to comment
> here with their own thoughts on all this, and perhaps give you some pointers.

Hi!

Yes, some help on SMIL would be great! You can get an idea of what
features still need to be implemented at: http://brian.sol1.net/svg/status.php

However, I would strongly recommend looking at animateMotion if you're
interested in SMIL. It should be quite self-contained and is very
"glamorous"! Also, you can look at the implementation of
animateTransform and get some ideas from there. There'd be enough
matrix maths to keep it interesting from a university project point of
view too and all the code for parsing path syntax and calculating path
lengths should be already available in Mozilla's SVG implementation.

It's a pretty big job but could be fun!

As for the other features:

* syncbase timing (or anything timing-related) -- although this is a
really big and important feature it needs a really good understanding
of SMIL which is hard to get quickly, you really have to go through
three different versions of the spec (SMIL Animation, SVG 1.1 chapters
11,5,16,F, and occasionally SMIL3) with a fine-toothed comb.

* integration with SVG types -- really important too but needs a good
understanding of the SVG codebase. Basically doing what has been done
for SVGLength2

* integration with CSS -- again, need to understand the Moz CSS code
(which I definitely don't) and I think this is already being taken
care of by others

* animateColor -- depends on integration with CSS

* xlink:href -- possible? Probably too small a feature although it
needs significant testing. Certainly not very glamorous either.

They're my initial thoughts. Looking forward to your contribution
wherever you decide to help!

Brian