An Introduction to SMIL

SMIL, pronounced "smile" stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. This new language is a W3C working draft. SMIL allows multimedia presentations to be written easily in a text editor. These multimedia presentations allow TV-like quality synchronization of elements that would require extensive programming with normal practices. SMIL can, for example allow an image to be displayed for a duration of 15 seconds whilst an audio clip plays, then be replaced by text as another audio track plays.

SMIL has been endorsed by many large companies including Microsoft, Netscape, Sun Microsystems and Real Networks. Many companies are working on their SMIL "players", including RealNetworks, and the popular Helio Soja implementation.

SMIL is an XML based language, so is therefore quite simple to learn as many people are familiar with the HTML/XML language type. SMIL has been written with the problems of the web in mind. It's very simple and very flexible. It has the capability to change the presentation based on the bandwidth that the user has, it can use many types of multimedia including audio, MIDI, graphics and text. It can be extended without re-writing the language to include new formats of multimedia.

For more information on SMIL visit:

• W3C SMIL Site
• W3C SMIL Working Draft
• Helio Soja Player's Site
• Web Techniques SMIL Tutorial
• (Mailing List) www-smil-request@w3.org - Subject should be "subscribe"