The Web's HyperText Markup Language has a lousy sense of timing. In fact, HTML has no sense of time at all–unless you resort to migraine-inducing chunks of JavaScript PRE, you can't create pages in which elements appear or disappear at specific times. Too bad, because time is a cornerstone of multimedia. Look at video and multimedia authoring programs: they're built around timeline-based windows that show a project in successive stages.

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.

Loops and fills control what, if any, behavior accompanies the end of a clip within your presentation.

You can specify when a particular clip or group of clips will begin to play within the presentation, as well as when it should end. Note: if you specify an end time that is longer than the length of the actual clip, you will need to decide what happens within the clip's region after it finishes.

As you noticed in the last practice example, playback regions can define where media play, but not when. This is the default behavior for media when no timing tags are provided in the SMIL file. But what if you want to play more than one at a time? SMIL includes timing tags for this purpose.

Intended for advanced users, this appendix provides a reference to SMIL 2.0 tags and attributes. Be sure to familiarize yourself with "Conventions Used in this Guide", which explains the typographical conventions used in this appendix.

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is a recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) intended to allow the easy implementation of sophisticated time-based multimedia content on the Web. SMIL is an XML extension and currently in version 1.0.

The Web's HyperText Markup Language has a lousy sense of timing. In fact, HTML has no sense of time at all–unless you resort to migraine-inducing chunks of JavaScript PRE, you can't create pages in which elements appear or disappear at specific times. Too bad, because time is a cornerstone of multimedia. Look at video and multimedia authoring programs: they're built around timeline-based windows that show a project in successive stages.

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

This document summarizes the accessibility features of the Synchronized Multimedia Language (SMIL), version 1.0 Recommendation ([SMIL10]). This document has been written so that other documents may refer in a consistent manner to the accessibility features of SMIL.

For a long time, dynamic movement on a Web site meant GIF animations, which were both tedious to create and annoying after the first three repetitions. Then came Macromedia Flash, one of the cooler authoring tools for Web animation, and, with its powerful tweening toolkit, turned drab Web sites into rich landscapes of sound and colour.

Always include captions and audio descriptions in your SMIL multimedia.

The <seq> element defines a sequence. The children elements of the <seq> element are displayed in a sequence, one after each other.

Philipp Hoschka, Interaction Domain Leader at W3C, started his presentation looking back on the history of SMIL which he defined as Synchronization of objects over time".

SMIL 1.0 provides a "test-attribute" mechanism to process an element only when certain conditions are true, for example when the language preference specified by the user matches that of a media object.

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Layer (SMIL), pronounced “smile", is a graphics language based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) that enables TV-like multimedia presentations. SMIL is an XML language that content authors can use to create TV-like multimedia presentations for the Web that will be played on browser plug-ins such as Real's RealOne player.

Example of what you can create with the new VisualScript V2.0 - multimedia presentations with text annotation - simply drag and drop the fades and wipes you want, attached your digital image, add text, then generate - to your choice of two target players.

This paper proposes an approach to the problem of generating metadata for composite mixed-media digital objects by appropriately combining and exploiting existing knowledge or metadata associated with the individual atomic components which comprise the composite object. Using a distributed collection of multimedia learning objects, we test this proposal by investigating mechanisms for capturing, indexing, searching and delivering digital online presentations using SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language).

One of the many uses of SMIL is to add text captions to video or audio content. At this time, Real provides the best documentation and support for the use of SMIL for text captions, using its XML-based RealText format. The major problem here is finding the documentation on Reals indecipherable and annoying website!

This appendix will help you utilize the many features of RealSystem and SMIL. Before following the production tips given here, make sure you have a good understanding of SMIL as described in Chapter 7.