SMILE

SMIL is an acronym for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language and is a standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for multimedia presentations. The SMIL language allows the integration of audio, video, images, text or any other multimedia content.

SMIL is pronounced the same way as smile, which means "smile".

SMIL the standard

The SMIL recommendation is in charge of the Synchronized Multimedia Activity working group (Activity on Multimedia Synchronization, under the acronym SYMM) of the World Wide Web Consortium. The objectives of this recommendation are:

• Define an XML-based language that allows authors to create multimedia presentations. Through SMIL, an author can describe the temporary behavior of his multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks to multimedia content and describe the layout of the presentation on the screen.
• Facilitate the reuse of SMIL syntax and semantics in other XML-based languages, particularly those that require synchronization and temporization. For example, SMIL can be integrated into XHTML and SVG.

As a W3C open standard, SMIL is patent-free.

How it works

SMIL consists of a set of XML tags that describe:

• Content sources: static image (JPEG, PNG, etc.), audio (MP3, WAV, etc.), video (MPG, AVI, etc.), plain text, text flows (SUB, RT, etc.) and animations (SVG, VML, etc.).
• Synchronization: each source of content can be reproduced in sequence or in parallel with others.
• Time: it is possible to define the moments in which a source of content should initiate or stop the reproduction, either through events, or through chronometer.
• Position: content sources can be positioned on the screen and adjust their size or other properties.
• Links: to interact with the user.
• Animations: to dynamically change the properties of content objects. For example, your position or color.

An appropriate player can read and interpret a SMIL file and play the actions described in it.

Possible applications

The most obvious use of SMIL is the creation of multimedia presentations or slides. However, other utilities are not ruled out:

• Subtitles of foreign films.
• Support for sensory decreases.
• karaoke.
• Teletype news.
• Among others.

SMIL is also being adopted as a means of harmonizing mobile multimedia messaging (MMS) formats.

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?
Δsmil xmlns:qt="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/smilextensions (breakable link available on the Internet Archive; see history, first version and last)." qt:time-slider="true"
≤2
≤2
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪
"author" content="juanjas2000@yahoo.es"/
"author" content="J.S."/
 backwardroot-layout width="480" height="400" background-color="red"/
≤"text" background-color="black" top="340" left="0" height="80" width="480" / 2005
¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü ¢Ü 
≤1"video" top="0" left="0" height="400" width="480" fit="meet"/105
Δ/layout
≤2
▪
Δpar dur="0:00:36.00"
≤1⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄2⁄21⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄21⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄21⁄21⁄21⁄2⁄21⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2⁄2
كa href="http://www.example.org" tax taximg src="barcelona1.jpg" alt="The vim icon" region="vim_icon01" dur="00:00:02.00" begin="00:00:00.00"/
Δimg src="barcelona2.jpg" alt="The vim icon" region="vim_icon01" dur="00:00:02.00" begin="00:00:02.0"/
"barcelona3.jpg" alt="The vim icon" region="vim_icon01" dur="00:00:02.00" begin="00:00:04.0"/
 backwards="0:00:30.00" src="cerveza.mpg" begin="00:00:06.00" region="video" title="video"/
≤2
▪
Δ/smil

Implementations

SMIL already has numerous implementations, including:

• Reproductors: facilitate the interpretation and execution of SMIL.
• Tools: facilitate the creation of SMIL to the authors.

Note that there are both commercial and open implementations, both free and paid, even though the standard is free and open.