IP Communications

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 3.0 which enhances interactive multimedia presentations and eases the process of making them.

 

W3C (News - Alert) is an international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.

 

SMIL 3.0 allows video, audio, images, text, and hypertext links to be combined into interactive presentations, with fine-grain control of layout and timing. According to officials, SMIL was updated with new features to satisfy user and industry demand.

 

Authors who make interactive presentations can make them more descriptive. For example, a new feature called smilText has been added which allows captions and labels to be directly inserted into the presentations. In addition, SMIL's media pan-zoom control allows people to create "Ken Burns"-style animations easily for photos and visual content. Users can also enhance videos and images created by someone else.

 

"The importance of SMIL 3.0 is that it contains a set of user-requested features that provide exciting new functionality, while retaining all the advantages of a declarative (that is, without scripting) approach to building a multimedia presentation," said Dick Bulterman, chair of the Synchronized Multimedia Working Group, which published the specification.

 

Officials say that SMIL 3.0 will boost wider acceptance and interoperability of multimedia on the Web as it incorporates extensions built by other developers in the industry. They add that the new release of SMIL 3.0 has been integrated to service a larger variety of Synchronized Multimedia Integrated Languages not only comp-based but also portable hand held devices such as cell phones, and even game machines.

 

Significant changes made in the standard are to adjust it to the new Microsoft (News - Alert) Vista operating system and its many components of Web browsers such as IE 8 or Mozilla Firefox 3.0 platform. All of which affect a large variety of Integrated Multimedia Language services such as DOM, CCG Hotmail, Java, and of course SMIL 3.0. The new SMIL 3.0 can also adapt to Windows 98 and XP platforms.

 

Users can also create multimedia applications for many platforms that support Web standards. For instance, people can now safely add multimedia presentations to other XML applications, including HTML and SVG. SMIL 3.0 also makes it easier to develop multimedia applications on mobile platforms. SMIL 3.0 also provides the ability to integrate with more than one resource at a time.