XML News from Tuesday, May 31, 2005

The Apache Web Services Project has posted a beta of Apache XML-RPC 2.0, a java class library for talking to XML-RPC based servers. Version 2.0 allows the use of different HTTP implementations, including a lightweight version of the Jakarta Commons HTTP Client. Disturbingly, this bundles a non-conformant XML parser. Yeah, like I'm really going to leave the XML plumbing and protocol details to the libraries when I can't even trust them to get basic things like XML parsing right.

The W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group has posted the candidate recommendation of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 2.1). SMIL 2.1 has four goals:

• Define an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL, an author can describe the temporal behaviour of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen.
• Allow reusing of SMIL syntax and semantics in other XML-based languages, in particular those who need to represent timing and synchronization. For example, SMIL components are used for integrating timing into XHTML and into SVG.
• Extend the functionalities contained in the SMIL 2.0 into new or revised SMIL 2.1 modules.
• Define new SMIL 2.1 Mobile Profiles incorporating features useful within the mobile industry.