About <acronym title="Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language">SMIL</acronym>
As I went recently onto RTÉ, I found out that the streams had a .smil extension – and Real Player had no trouble opening it. A bit baffled, I realised that cybercodeur.net had released a brief article about SMIL. SMIL (pronounce “smile”) which “allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 2.0, an author can describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen” (W3C). SMIL is an XML-like language allowing to position media contents as well as synchronizing them.
I found a fairly old (1999) but good tutorial written by Hervé Foucher; on the website there is also a viewer called “Soja”. Anyway, SMIL is already a few years old but it begins to get out. It has to fight against Flash and SVG… The thing is, SMIL looks pretty close to HTML and that is a good thing: it will allow webmasters, who might not have the sufficient skills (even though it is kind of easy to create Flash animations) nor the money to pay for Flash tools, to go multimedia.
To read more about SMIL: A Realist’s SMIL Manifesto part I and part II.
