SMIL updated for mobile data presentations

By Alun Williams

Posted on 15 Dec 2005 at 15:38

The Internet standards body W3C - the World Wide Web Consortium - has given its approval to SMIL 2.1, the language for authoring interactive multimedia presentations, involving streaming audio and video with graphics and text.

SMIL (pronounced smile) now sees enhanced timing, layout and animation capabilities and better support for handheld devices with new mobile profiles (a collection of SMIL modules that provide support for SMIL 2.1 within the context of a mobile device).

'Today with SMIL 2.1, W3C makes good on the promise of first class multimedia presentations for the mobile Web,' explained Chris Lilley, Chair of W3C's Hypertext Coordination Group. 'Many vendors have already voiced their support for SMIL 2.1, in addition to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project.'

The XML-based SMIL allows authors to manipulate a wide range of presentation data, which can be stored locally or remotely. The clever twist with SMIL is that all content can be searchable because the relevant text file can include metadata components. For the likes of search engines this is a boon, because they are better able to identify the ever growing resource of online multimedia material.

The W3C has announced SMIL 2.1 as a formal W3C Recommendation, which means it should be favoured for adoption by the industry (it reached the more provisional Candidate Recommendation stage in May).

The last major iteration for SMIL - version 2.0 - emerged back in August 2001. At the beginning of this year, the World Wide Web Consortium released SMIL 2.0 Second Edition, but this was not actually a new version of SMIL - the purpose of the edition was 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.

Activities in the SMIL arena will also dovetail with the W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI). Its recommendations should be designed to integrate with existing profiles and established standards including XHTML, SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) for audiovisual content and SVG scalable vector graphics.

Its Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group is looking to create authoring guidelines and best practices for content providers, and the Device Description Working Group is developing improved device description methods that website authors can refer to when tailoring sites to specific devices.