SMIL, you're on candid camera

 

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Posted on 13 Aug 2001 at 12:37

There's a new W3C standard for creating interactive multimedia presentations on the Web: SMIL 2.0.

Standing for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, SMIL concerns the presentation of video, audio and text. The idea, however, is to be more than just television over the Web - the standard is intended to be flexible and device-independent.

"SMIL 2.0 enables authors to bring rich content to the Web in a format that is easily written and reused," believes Tim Berners-Lee, a W3C Director. "SMIL 2.0 avoids the limitations of traditional television and lowers the bandwidth requirements for delivering multimedia content over the Internet."

In theory, a simple text editor could be used to create multi-media applications - the XML-based SMIL allowing you to incorporate a range of data, which can be stored locally or remotely. The clever twist is that all content can be searchable because the text file can include metadata components. For the likes of search engines this will be a boon, they will be able to identify an ever growing resource of online multimedia material.

The Internet standards body W3C - the World Wide Web Consortium - announced SMIL 2.0 as a formal W3C Recommendation, which means it should be favoured for adoption by the industry.

Author: Alun Williams