W3C smiles on multimedia integration language for websites

By Alun WIlliams

Posted on 10 Jan 2005 at 11:39

The W3C Internet standards body has polished its recommendations for creating interactive multimedia presentations on the Web via SMIL.

Standing for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, SMIL (pronounced 'smile') 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.

While the World Wide Web Consortium has released SMIL 2.0 Second Edition as a W3C Recommendation it is not actually a new version of SMIL - the purpose of this edition is to correct errors in the SMIL 2.0 first edition, such as missing attributes, the handling of class elements and typographical errors in the standards document itself.

The full list of corrections can be found online at the W3C website, where test suites for the standard are also available.

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 better able to identify the ever growing resource of online multimedia material.

A status of 'Recommendation' for a specification means that the W3C favours its adoption by the industry.

Version 2.0 was first adopted back in August 2001 - SMIL, you're on candid camera.