SMIL 2.0: XML For Web Multimedia

On 7 August, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released version 2.0 of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or SMIL (pronounced smile). Three years ago, SMIL 1.0 introduced a basic foundation for Web multimedia and, as the sidebar SMIL support describes, it quickly gained widespread use. With a specification document about 15 times as large as version 1.0, SMIL 2.0 builds on this foundation and marks an enormous step forward in multimedia functionality. SMIL's features fall into five categories: media content, layout, timing, linking, and adaptivity. The latter brings altogether new features to the Web, letting authors adapt content to different market groups, user abilities, system configurations, and run-time system delays. In this tutorial, I ll cover each feature category and its basic constructs using a simple SMIL presentation built with the SMIL 2.0 Language Profile, which is the flagship SMIL-defined language for multimedia browsers.