Presentation Dynamism in XML

The move towards a semantic web will produce an increasing number of presentations whose creation is based upon semantic queries. Intelligent presentation generation engines have already begun to appear, as have models and platforms for adaptive presentations. However, in many cases these models are constrained by the lack of expressiveness in current generation presentation and animation languages. Moreover, authors of dynamic, adaptive web content must often use considerable amounts of script or code, thus breaking the declarative description possible in the original presentation language. Furthermore, the scripting/coding approach does not lend itself to authoring by non-programmers. In this paper we describe a set of XML language extensions that bring tools from the functional programming world to web authors, extending the power of declarative modeling for the web. The extensions are described in the context of SMIL Animation and SVG, but could be applied to many XML-based languages.