Like most people developing Web content today, I found my way here from another discipline. I spent my first two post-college years working in the video industry. In fact, the only reason I'm not still grinding my teeth away to nubbins in an editing suite somewhere is because I had the unlikely good fortune of losing the master copy of my demo reel in the mail while between jobs, forcing a career move into the burgeoning world of the Internet.

SMILGen is a SMIL (and XML) authoring tool designed to ease the process of XML content creation. SMILGen understands XML syntax and handles the nesting and formatting XML. This allows authors to worry about the content that they are trying to author with out having to remember each quote and closing brace. SMILGen also understands the languages it authors, it knows what attributes a specific element uses or what child elements a given element may contain. Both of these features help eliminate a number of common XML syntax errors as well as making it easier to edit with out having a reference to the language right by your side.

When your streaming presentation contains multiple clips—such as a video and streaming text played together—you use Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) to coordinate the parts. Pronounced "smile," SMIL is a simple but powerful markup language for specifying how and when clips play. This section introduces you to SMIL, its advantages, and its syntax rules.

If you've been following our series of articles on SMIL/G2, you've already seen an overview of G2/SMIL technology, URLs for all the tools you'll need, and a detailed G2/SMIL Tutorial. The first tutorial covered RealPix and the SMIL language, and if you were able to follow through, enabled you to get started creating your own SMIL presentations. In this tutorial, we'll cover RealText, and show you how to use it along with RealPix in your SMIL presentations.

If adopted as a standard, a new World Wide Web Consortium public draft promises to deliver that elusive "television-style content" over the Web, without arcane scripting or strangled bandwidth.

Right now, when it comes to creating animation for the Web, Flash is king — people sic it on everything from rollover buttons to entire site interfaces. But will it reign supreme forever? Web developers are a fickle bunch, and Flash could always be dethroned by another multimedia technology as long as it was easy to use, could be viewed all users, and employed by a familiar programming language (thus ensuring speedy development and a friendly learning curve).

With the introduction of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced smile) earlier this year, Web multimedia creators have a new tool set for building time-based, streaming multimedia presentations that combine audio, video, images, and text. The proposed SMIL standard defines an XML-based language that allows control over the what, where, and when of media elements in a multimedia presentation with a simple, clear markup language similar to HTML.

I've written a series of 10 articles on SMIL for both WebReview.com and WDVL.com over the last six months. The links to these articles are under the "tutorials" pull down menu.

This document aims to provide a format for metadata regarding the copyright license under which a SMIL document is released. As the name suggests, it originates from the Creative Commons project, but is not restricted to the licenses that they produce. Rather, it is designed to allow for the inclusion of any existing and future licenses, and to provide for the simple description thereof. More details on this can be found on the Creative Commons site, especially the metadata specification page.

If you've been following our introduction to G2 and SMIL, you've probably already downloaded the Preview Edition of the G2 Player. Hopefully you've taken a look at some of the incredible media that has been produced with SMIL, RealPix and RealText. And of course you've looked at the incredible Razor's Edge video. If so, you've gotta be yearning to create some of that G2 content yourself. That's what this tutorial will do--get you started in the Wide World of true streaming multimedia presentations for the Web.

In the absence of finalized rich media standards for the web, plug-ins were developed that enabled websites to offer streaming video, animated vector graphics, annoying music tracks, and the like. Over the past couple of years, W3C recommendations have emerged to suggest standardized ways of doing what proprietary plug-ins already do so well.

The SMIL family of XML applications enables synchronized display of multimedia elements on the Web. Didier Martin explores SMIL, and the new synchronization features in Microsoft's IE5.5."