W3C Blog

SMIL stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. It is an XML language which has been designed for creating interactive multimedia presentations, including timing and synchronization. For example, a fade effect from black to a photograph, or starting an animation at the same time than an audio file.

For curious

A batch or articles has been published this year about SMIL 3.0

• SMIL 3.0 Draft, Whats New?
• What is in Store for SMIL 3.0 with IE 8
• SMIL 3.0 and IE8 with Firefox 3.0

There are a few SMIL players.

For developers

SMIL 3.0 is right now in candidate recommendation phase. It means that they are in the process of testing implementability of each new features of SMIL 3.0. They published a SMIL 3.0 test suite and an implementation report (being updated), that you have to complete with SMIL 2.0 test suite and a SMIL 2.1 test suite.

It would be great if there was a community effort like it was done in the past for CSS with different compatibility charts such as Quirksmode CSS chart, WestCIV CSS browser support or the good ol' abridged CSS support from Mac Edition folks. People would run the test cases in the different players and reports the level of implementations. It would help many developers to fix eventual bugs in their own players and give a good resource for SMIL content developers to avoid minefields.

The test cases are here for you to play with.