SMIL Implementations...of Anything

31 December 05

SMIL continues to hang-on as the W3C’s answer to a standards-based, synchronized, multimedia framework, but there is yet few places to find any production in this area. I’m hoping to find time some day to demonstrate my own example.

SMIL is one of those things I have known about for quite a while, have been talking about using for an equal period of time (as my grad professors could vouch), but I have yet to do anything with worth boasting about. I swear by the heavens I’m going to change that.

SMIL is basically an XML-based language, which integrates seemlessly with XHTML and can be combined with CSS to produce multimedia presentations that are only limited by your imagination, though there are many technical considerations, of course.

SMIL itself seems to be making slow headway in the mainstream, and I think it’s too bad, but I wouldn’t be quick to throw in the towel for SMIL just yet. There are some dedicated people working on it, and it’s implementation is a lot greater than what most people realize. Just two months ago the new SMIL 2.1 Recommendation was published.

In any case, I’ve been wanting to do something with SMIL, anything, for the shear experience of it, and I have various ideas in mind as starter projects, like a simple slide show. Eventually, I would like to write a storyboard or script (as in a video script, or similar) and produce a multimedia presentation from there. A presentation like this might be for anything, from a travel experience I’ve had (e.g., my latest trip to Tunisia) to a glossy Webmercial. I think it’s not far fetched that a Weblog could even be done in such a way as to publish regular multimedia articles as opposed to just text alone. We’re already seeing audio Weblogs, and video Weblogs, and certainly photo Weblogs; the next step is just a matter of putting all the media types together in a synchronized package, throw in some interactivity and content management, and you have something interesting to play around with.

The Web site of KMGI Studios is NOT an example of SMIL being used (KMGI’s site is likely done in Flash), but it is a fantastic example of multimedia presentation, and also of what SMIL is capable of in the right hands. Wondering about the pros and cons of SMIL instead of Flash? Well first of all, comparing the two is erroneous. Have a look at Zeldman’s article SMIL When You Play That. It’s a bit dated, but still very much on mark about SMIL’s technological benefits and distinctions from Flash.

Another thing I’ve been looking at, and as extension of the SMIL experimentation, is the embedding of media player components into regular XHTML pages to completely minimize the appearance of the media player at all. It can be done, but similar to the browser wars, there are issues between media players too, the big boys being RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Quicktime. Regardless, interesting stuff to fool around with.