SMIL: a way to make an ideal web-presentation.

SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is an XML application, created by the W3C Consortium. The most recent SMIL standard version is 2.0, and it has been released on 7 August 2001. Its main purpose was to define a language optimal for writing interactive multimedia presentations, also with support of reusing the syntax and semantics of SMIL to ther XML languages, such as XHTML.

It is a very powerful language, giving you a lot of control over the contents of the presentation. You can integrate different types of media simultaneously, such as audio, video, images and text. It allows you to synchronize different pieces of text with images, or to play a small video at the end of the presentation.

SMIL represents a cross-industry agreement for the publication of presentations online. There are a wide variety of SMIL players, between which the most popular are Oratrix’s GRiNS, RealPlayer, Apple’s QuickTime and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The closer one to W3C SMIL 2.0 recommendations

There are very many advantages of using SMIL. Between them the most important are:

• SMIL is vendor-independent, easy to use declarative language for web-presentations. It uses a text format, so you can create a SMIL presentation with any text editor, like Notepad.
• It allow the integration of different types of media, such as images, video and text. A SMIL presentation does not contain the images or video. Instead it streams them from outside the document, simply by referencing to them and letting the included software play it.
• SMIL supports spatial layouts, such as regions and more advanced multiple windows layouts and hierarchical layouts. That would create an abstract rendering surface, where you could decide what types of media you can present for every space.
• The most important advantage of SMIL is the advanced timing and synchronization features. You could use the elements <par>, <seq> and <excl>, so that you could ideally coordinate and synchronize  the presentation in the best way you want on a specified timeline. As an example, you could specify that the beginning of an audio narration comes after an image is shown for 5 seconds.