Subject: W3C draft "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language"

From: Philipp Hoschka <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 1997 12:07:13 +0100

The first draft of a language for describing synchronized multimedia
presentations is available at

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-smil

This draft was produced by the W3C working group on Synchronized Multimedia.
Comments/Feedback from people on this list are *very* welcome. They should be sent 
to [email-masked]. 

>From the introduction:

"SMIL allows integrating a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized 
multimedia presentation. Using SMIL, presentations such as a slide show synchronized 
with audio comments or a video synchronized with a text stream can be described. 

A typical SMIL presentation has the following characteristics: 

      - The presentation is composed of several components that are accessible via a URL, 
        e.g. files stored on an http or rtsp server. 
      - The components have different media types, such as audio, video, image or text. 
      - The begin and end times of different components have to be synchronized with 
        events  in other components. For example, in a slide show, a particular slide 
        is displayed when the narrator in the audio starts talking about it. 
      - The user can control the presentation by using control buttons known from 
        video-recorders, such as stop, fast-forward and rewind. Additional functions are 
      "random access", i.e. the presentation can be started anywhere, and "slow motion", 
       i.e. the presentation is played slower than at its original speed. 
      - The user can follow hyper-links embedded in the presentation 

SMIL has been designed so that it is easy to author simple presentations with a text 
editor. The key to success for HTML was that attractive hypertext content could be 
created without requiring a sophisticated authoring tool. SMIL achieves the same for 
synchronized hypermedia."