Basics
SMIL stands for "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language".
SMIL presentations combine files of many types, such as video, audio,
text, and graphics in real time to create interactive multimedia
presentations. Here are a few examples:
SMIL 2.0 is currently in development as a specification by the
WWW Consortium (W3C), and has achieved
"Recommendation" status as of June 2001.
So, what is it? It is a markup language, similar to HTML (although
written in a form of XML). In fact, SMIL plays the same role (providing
information about how to layout and format a page) in a media player
as HTML does for a Web Web browser. SMIL includes specific tags
and structures just as HTML does.
One key difference between SMIL and HTML (besides the application
that interprets the files) is that SMIL also includes tags for timing
in addition to layout. The goal of the SMIL specification developers
was to come up with a way to quickly and simply control the precise
timing of elements in a presentation. For example, it's possible
to tag a particular spoken sentence and make it coincide with the
display of a given image appearing on the screen.
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