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
Introduction
Starting out as a tool for accessing ASCII-based hypertext, the World Wide Web has been very successful in integrating new media types like images, virtual worlds or downloadable program code. In the last year, we have been witnessing major progress in the integration of two more media types, namely audio and video. For instance, the Web is now used as an interface to Internet telephones and videophones, i.e. for applications that allow people to talk and see each other in real-time on the Internet. Web-based audio/video-on-demand, i.e.
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is an XML language. Although content authors can create their own XML languages for such purposes, SMIL is the recommended language for creating multimedia presentations because it includes accessibility and internationalization features. SMIL is supported by two popular user agents for multimedia, RealPlayer and QuickTime Movie Player.
The W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL-access/) points out that:
"Dynamic multimedia presents a number of challenges to people with disabilities and to authors of
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a format of graphic that can be generated on the fly by using the data extracted from XML files or a database. Creating images on the fly in the other formats like GIF, JPEG, and BMP are not easy since they cannot be created dynamically by extracting data from the data file. Moreover if you view images from these formats at 200% or 300% of the actual size you will not see the images clearly and you will be seeing granular forms of the areas in the images. You need external tools like Paintbrush, Photoshop, and Fireworks
Short for Scalable Vector Graphics, a vector graphics file format that enables two-dimensional images to be displayed in XML pages on the Web. Vector images are created through text-based commands formatted to comply with XML specifications. In contrast to JPEG and GIF images on the Web, which are bitmapped and always remain a specified size, SVG images are scalable to the size of the viewing window and will adjust in size and resolution according to the window in which it is displayed.
Benefits of SVG include:
* smaller files size than regular
RSS/XML