Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is to synchronized multimedia what HTML is to hyperlinked text. Pronounced smile, SMIL is a simple, vendor-neutral markup language designed to let Web builders of all skill levels schedule audio, video, text, and graphics files across a timeline without having to master development tools or complex programming languages.
Whilst the SMIL language is a powerful tool for creating synchronized multimedia presentations on the web over low bandwidth connections. It is mainly meant to work with linear presentations where several types of media can be synchronized to one timeline. It does not work well with non-linear presentations and its ability to skip around in the timeline is buggy at best. However, for slideshow style mixed media presentations it the best the web has to offer.
For instance, with just a text editor and a few lines of HTML-like tags, SMIL lets Web builders specify such actions as
SMIL marks a significant step toward making it easy to create low-bandwidth, TV-like content on the Web. It offers a new level of control over synchronized multimedia by allowing individual components of a presentation to be choreographed across a timeline in relation to each other. It also lets you control the layout, appearance, and exit time of each file.
What makes SMIL different from other multimedia presentation tools is that instead of forcing each component into a single video file, the text-based SMIL file merely references each file by its URL. Since the media files exist outside of the SMIL file, they retain their individual file sizes; there's no file-size bloat to slow download times.
SMIL's text-based format also makes multimedia presentations easy to edit. If you want to change when an audio component within a complex presentation begins, you can just edit the SMIL file. You don't have to rebuild the entire presentation from scratch.
As an application of XML, SMIL supports hyperlinks, which makes it the first Web-specific multimedia language to offer true interactivity.