The SMIL format can help a person to create a presentation, by integrating independent multimedia objects and synchronizing them. SMIL allows it's users to define the behavior of the presentation in time, describe how the presentation will look on the screen and associate hyperlinks to the media objects.
Basically, the SMIL documents are of XML 1.0 type, so if you want to learn how to use SMIL, it's best to first learn XML.
A SMIL document is made of two parts: the head and the body of the document.
The head element contains
The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced "smile") enables simple authoring of interactive audiovisual presentations. SMIL is typically used for multimedia presentations that can integrate streaming audio and video with images, text or any other media type.
SMIL presentations are described by text files. You can create or edit a SMIL presentation using a text editor, and you can automatically generate a SMIL document using any script language that creates text files. A SMIL document specifies what media elements to present
"Although MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) also looks at content and coding, SMIL is more web-centric unlike MPEG, which is more media centric and involves more than just content and coding. A close comparison would be D-HTML (dynamic hypertext markup language). However, D-HTML uses scripted definitions of local behaviours, without a notion of the presentation's context. Actions such as timed events are therefore difficult to co-ordinate.
Then there are W3C technologies such as cascading style sheets (CSS) which are compatible with SMIL, which
This document specifies version 1 of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 1.0, pronounced “smile”). SMIL allows integrating a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation. Using SMIL, an author can:
describe the temporal behavior of the presentation
describe the layout of the presentation on a screen
associate hyperlinks with media objects
This specification is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the specification approach. Section 2 defines the “smil” element. Section 3
This document specifies version 1 of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 1.0, pronounced "smile"). SMIL allows integrating a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation. Using SMIL, an author can
describe the temporal behavior of the presentation
describe the layout of the presentation on a screen
associate hyperlinks with media objects
This specification is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the specification approach. Section 2 defines the "smil" element. Section 3 defines the