An Introduction to SMIL

Jeffery Zeldman has long been considered the King of Web Standards. In this article for A List Apart back in 2001 he talked a little bit about SMIL and what it would mean for web standards and accessibility.

"SMIL stands for “Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language,” and is pronounced “Smile.” Isn’t that cute? Oh, shut up.

SMIL is an easy-to-learn, HTML-like language for creating “TV-like multimedia presentations such as training courses on the web,” according to the W3C. The current SMIL recommendation is 1.0, and you can read all about it at the W3C address cited immediately above, and at another one we’ll mention later. This is our way of avoiding adding fifty pages to this article.

Aside from the fact that Internet heavies like Real, Apple, Adobe, and Macromedia are throwing their weight behind SMIL, why should you care about any of this? Let’s see.

Harnessing media, helping users

SMIL packs accessibility features including alternative text content that can be made available to Braille readers. Such content will also enable search engines to index multimedia web content authored in SMIL.In English: Slap a Quicktime video on your site, and search engines like Google or Altavista couldn’t care less. But add a carefully authored SMIL presentation to your site, and speeches made by the characters in your video could show up in Google and Altavista’s search results."

Read the full article by Jeffery Zeldman to learn more about his ideas on the future of web accessibility.