W3C Advances SMIL 3.0 Standard for Synchronized Multimedia

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a new standard to make it easier to author interactive multimedia presentations. "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 3.0)" allows video, audio, images, text, and hypertext links to be combined into interactive presentations, with fine-grain control of layout and timing. "The importance of SMIL 3.0 is that it contains a set of user-requested features that provide exciting new functionality, while retaining all the advantages of a declarative (that is, without scripting) approach to building a multimedia presentation," said Dick Bulterman, chair of the Synchronized Multimedia Working Group, which published the specification. Read the full press release, testimonials, and learn more about the Synchronized Multimedia Activity at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-SMIL3-20081201/cover.html