SMIL

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 uses two main tags: parallel and sequential. 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