A. About SMIL Boston

Editors:

Philipp Hoschka, W3C (ph@w3.org)

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

This document specifies the "Boston" version of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced "smile"). SMIL Boston has the following two design goals:

• Define a simple XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL Boston, an author can describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen.
• Allow reusing of SMIL syntax and semantics in other XML-based languages, in particular those who need to represent timing and synchronization. For example, SMIL Boston components should be used for integrating timing into XHTML.

SMIL Boston is defined as a set of markup modules, which define the semantics and an XML syntax for certain areas of SMIL functionality. All modules have an associated Document Object Model (DOM).

SMIL Boston deprecates some SMIL 1.0 syntax in favor of more DOM friendly syntax. Most notable is the change from hyphenated attribute names to mixed case (camel case) attribute names, e.g., clipBegin is introduced in favor of clip-begin. The SMIL Boston modules do not contain these SMIL 1.0 attributes so that integration applications are not burdened with supporting them. SMIL document players, those applications that support playback of "application/smil" documents (or <smil></smil> documents (or however we denote SMIL documents vs. integration documents)) must support the SMIL 1.0 attribute names.

This specification is structured as follows: Section B presents the individual modules in more detail, and gives example profiles. Section 2 defines the animation module. Section C defines the animation module. Section D defines control elements such as the switch element. Section E defines the SMIL event model. Section F defines syntax that is only used when SMIL modules are integrated into other XML-based languages. Section G defines the elements that can be used to define the layout of a SMIL presentation. Section H provides for XML linking into SMIL documents. Section I defines elements and attributes allowing to describe media objects. Section J defines the meta element functionality. Section K defines the elements that form the sceleton of a SMIL document (head, body etc.). Section L defines the Timing and Synchronization elements. In particular, this Section defines the time model used in SMIL. Section M explains how SMIL timing can be integrated into other XML-based languages.

2 Acknowledgements

This document has been prepared by the Synchronized Multimedia Working Group (WG) of the World Wide Web Consortium. The WG includes the following individuals:

• Jeff Ayars, RealNetworks
• Dick Bulterman, CWI
• Wo Chang, NIST
• Aaron Cohen, Intel
• Ken Day, Macromedia
• Lynda Hardman, CWI
• Masayuki Hiyama, Glocomm
• Erik Hodge, RealNetworks
• Philipp Hoschka, W3C
• Jack Jansen, CWI
• Muriel Jourdan, INRIA
• Keisuke Kamimura, Glocomm
• Kenichi Kubota, Panasonic
• Nabil Layaïda, INRIA
• Philippe Le Hégaret, W3C
• Pietro Marchisio, CSELT
• Jacco van Ossenbruggen, CWI
• Didier Pillet, France Telecom
• Hanan Rosenthal, Canon
• Lloyd Rutledge, CWI
• Bridie Saccocio, RealNetworks
• Patrick Schmitz, Microsoft
• Warner ten Kate, Philips
• Ted Wugofski, Gateway (Invited Expert)
• Jin Yu, Compaq

In addition to the working group members, the following people contributed to the SMIL effort: Dan Austin (CNET), Rob Glidden (Web3D), Mark Hakkinen (The Productivity Works), Jonathan Hui (Canon), Rob Lanphier (RealNetworks), Tony Parisi (Web3D), Dave Raggett (W3C).