All the content of the RealText file exists between the required opening and closing </window> tags. The window tag takes several parameters:

Animation Example.

Below the header information, the RealPix file contains a list of all the images that will be used in the presentation. You can think of this section of the file as a sort of content library from which the presentation will draw.

The tables in this appendix summarize link formats for each type of delivery method and content type.

Also known as "The Car Video" in accessibility circles, this multiple-language captioned and described Real movie is widely shown as an example. Change the language in RealPlayer to view this video in German. Also available in QuickTime and Windows Media.

In the following example fragment, the position of a text element is set to a 5 pixel distance from the top border of the rendering window:

Go to the W3C site for the latest information on SMIL and the definitive reference on SMIL 1.0 and 2.0 and related W3C work. If you are creating SMIL files, make use of the online validation service.

RealOne Player provides several means for delivering information about a presentation, such as its title, author, and copyright. This chapter covers these information features, and explains the accessibility features available for sight-impaired persons.

A user agent (UA) might not have the ability to process and view SVG documents. The following list outlines two of the backwards compatibility scenarios associated with SVG documents:

What's good and bad about the RSS+SMIL playlist format I made up? What's bad is boringly obvious -- complexity -- so in this document I will leave that aside and write only about the good. To avoid having to constantly repeat the long string "the RSS+SMIL playlist format I made up", I am giving that format the name RSS+Time.

SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is very much like HTML. It is actually a form of XML (Extensible Markup Language). SMIL is used to control the way multimedia content is displayed on the Web. You can read about the SMIL standard at http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ - external link. Quicktime 4.1+ is required for SMIL to work.

Real provides several examples to demonstrate how RealOne implements SMIL 2.0. The "switching" category has some examples of captioning.

This segment of the working draft specifies an architecture for applying timing information to XML documents. It specifies the syntax and semantics of the constructs that provide timing information. This approach builds on SMIL by preserving SMIL's timing model and maintaining the semantics of SMIL constructs.

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language or SMIL is a markup language which allows users to combine and coordinate text, video, graphics, audio, and graphics into a single choreographed presentation similar to what you might see on TV, in a slide show, or in a PowerPoint presentation (see example, "Guidelines for Safe Investing").

SMIL switching gives you a powerful way to provide different clips that RealOne Player chooses between based on certain criteria. For example, you can have each RealOne Player select an audio track based on each viewer's language preference. This chapter explains how to set up switch groups to stream different clips to different audiences.

SMIL makes it easy to include advertisements in your streaming presentation. You can lay out ad banners, supply ad URLs, and even specify the times when ads appear. This chapter provides examples of how you can use SMIL to include ads in your presentations. Before you start, you should have a thorough understanding of SMIL as described in Chapter 7.

RealServer's general ad serving feature lets you include a banner ad or a rich media ad with requested SMIL files or clips. You lay out the presentation with SMIL, but instead of including URLs to ad clips, you add tags that cause RealServer to get the ad URLs from an ad server.

SMIL is the W3C recommendation for bringing synchronized multimedia to the Web. Version 1.0 of SMIL was accepted as a recommendation in June 1998. Work is expected to be soon underway for preparing the next version of SMIL, version 2.0. Issues that will need to be addressed in developing version 2.0 include not just adding new features but also establishing SMIL's relationship with various related existing and developing W3C efforts.

By now you can tell that SMIL depends heavily on the element of time to keep things running smoothly. In the following section, we'll pick apart the timeline and see how to run our elements in loops, one after another, in parallel, or simultaneously using independent timelines.

A RealPix file contains information about how a certain set of images will be displayed in a certain region of your SMIL presentation. In fact, you can think of it as a mini-presentation within your SMIL presentation.