SMIL (pronounced "smile") is an abbreviation for the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. It is a W3C Recommendation for describing multimedia presentations using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). It defines timing markup, layout markup, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things.
SMIL 1.0 became an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium W3C in June 1998. SMIL 2.0 became an official recommendation in August 2001. A W3C working group is currently working on SMIL 2.1, which will include a small number of extensions based on practical experience gathered using SMIL in the Multimedia Messaging System on mobile phones.
A SMIL document is similar in structure to an HTML document in that they are typically divided between a <head> section and a <body> section. The <head> section contains layout and metadata information. The <body> section contains the timing information, and is generally comprised of combinations of two main tags: parallel ("<par>") and sequential ("<seq>"). It refers to media objects by URLs, allowing them to be shared between presentations and stored on different servers for load balancing. The language can also associate different media objects with different bandwidths.
SMIL enables people without programming or scripting backgrounds to author multimedia presentations in a simple text editor. For example, a developer can write SMIL to display an image after an audio track ends.
See Also: Semantic Web, HTML+SMIL aka HTML+TIME, XHTML+SMIL
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