Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language)

SMIL (pronounced “smile”) is an XML language for combining audio, video, text, animation, and graphics in a precise, synchronized fashion. A SMIL file instructs the client to retrieve media elements that reside on the server as standalone files. Those separate elements are then assembled and played by the SMIL player.

The SMIL 1.0 Recommendation, released in June of 1998, was one of the first XML-based DTDs proposed by the W3C. The SMIL 2.0 Recommendation, released in January 2005, greatly expands upon the functionality established in the initial specification. It is broken into modules to be used with XHTML 1.1.