On Wed, 3 Aug 2005 19:20:34 +0200, "Ripper" <net@n...> wrote:

>Hello everyone...
>
>I'm working on a school project - creating a jukebox application using SMIL.
>You can check it out via
>http://free-zg.t-com.hr/ripper/project/videobox1.smil
>
>Since I'm new to these XML related technologies, naturally I have many
>questions, but I'll cut them down to one or two.
>First let me just explain what this project is about. The SMIL is suppossed
>to be generated through XSLT (right?) 

SMIL documents are generally very simple. You can generate them from
an XML file using XSLT if you prefer, but it's also practical to just
generate them by string replacement of placeholders eg {src} and
{target}. Using XSLT will probably get you more marks in your project,
however.

> and should be served on a Apache Cacoon server. 

<sp.> Cocoon

>So what do I do with the SMIL code? 

Understand what SMIL does and how many possible variations there are
to describe how to play media files ! Examples are at Apple's
Quicktime site and Realnetworks Real Player site for examples :

http://www.realnetworks.com/resources/howto/smil/smilbasics.html
http://www.apple.com.tw/quicktime/technologies/interactivity/smil.html

> Do I embedd it in the XML
>or do I embedd it in the XSL file. Furthermore, i should also generate some
>html stuff, do I embed the code inside XML or the XSL?

You must generate the SMIL and HTML as separate files - they cannot be
embedded within each other (although a variant, HTML+TIME which is MS
IE only, can be embedded in this way, it's not cross browser
compatible or really, any use at all ;-)

>Can anybody tell me which data should I include in the XML and which not.

Include all your relevant data in the XML and transform it twice, once
to SMIL (providing some of the information in your XML document, eg
media source, text file URL, window layout information etc) and a
second time to create an XHTML file with a full description of the
media the SMIL file references - the video duration, title and a long
description for example. 

Also (obviously) create a link in the XHTML page which links to the
page (that uses XML+XSLT to generate the SMIL file). You should be
sending a header of application/smil for files ending in .smil (or for
any scripting language - PHP, ASP, JSP used to create a SMIL file)

Cheers - Neil