Projects

NOTE: See also X-Smiles current tasks at SourceForge.

Short-term goals

The X-Smiles browser is currently at a beta stage. Many features are working, but many more are not yet there.
This document is a wish list of future features in X-Smiles.

Porting and testing on embedded devices

This is one of the main goals of X-Smiles project. Current activity includes porting X-Smiles to Kaffe VM. Also, we have a J2ME Personal Profile port working. See FAQ. What we need currently, is interested developers, who are willing to test these in a real device and report the results back to us.

Complete CSS 2.1 rendering

We support CSS 2.1 mobile profile using just basic AWT Graphics drawing operations. We are still missing a lot of CSS features, including negative margins, fixesd positioning, overflow: scroll, etc.

SVG support

Currently, X-Smiles uses CSIRO SVG viewer. Apache's Batik is a more complete SVG implementation, so it should be integrated into X-Smiles. Batik does not support SVG animation yet, though. The main problem here is combining the DOM implementations, so that scripting and mixing languages work seamlessly.

Legacy HTML+scripting support

The browser can read and fix broken HTML pages. This works by internally converting the (broken) HTML stream into XHTML. What we still need is HTML DOM (level 0) support, so that legacy scripts would work. Also, we have some support for HTML forms, but the implementation is not complete. Additionally, legacy HTML style parameters should be supported by converting them into CSS properties. We need interested developers, who could be willing to contribute to this area.

Timesheets: Better integration of time and spatial dimensions

SMIL is a good format for time-based documents, but we feel that there is a better way to include time in XML documents. We have started a prototype implementation of timesheets.

Long-term goals

X-Smiles is mainly a research project, so the long-term goals include more research-oriented goals

Browser API: Standardizing module based design of Web clients

Great XML languages with good implementation are popping up all the time. What is missing, is a standardized framework for XML language implementations that could be plugged into a Web client. This is much more complicated than the normal browser plugins, since the languages must integrate at a lower level (DOM). How to integrate the layout, for instance, is another difficult topic in this area.

New communication modes: SIP, JXTA, Web Services

HTTP is great protocol, but has known limitations. Interactive P2P services should be built on top of some other protocol, such as SIP, JXTA or Web Services.

Layout models and CSS

How powerful CSS is? Can and should CSS be extended to different layout models and modalities?

Multimodal interaction

We are interested in researching multiple modalities in Browser context. Current interests include combining speech and graphical UI modalities. XForms could be used as the basis, and the concrete UI could be rendered using Speech, CSS, SVG, or even X3D graphics simultaniously.