SMIL 3.0
Interactive Multimedia for the Web, Mobile Devices and Daisy Talking Books
Series: X.media.publishing

Dick C.A. Bulterman and
Lloyd Rutledge
2008, 536 p. 146 figs., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-3-540-78546-0
Published: November, 2008

The SMIL 3.0 language is the W3C's standard language for web-based multimedia. This book provides a comprehensive guide to all of SMIL's elements and attributes for all versions, from the complete SMIL Language profile to SMIL Tiny. Driven by dozens of examples and illustrated code fragments, every aspect of SMIL is treated in this book.

Starting with essential background on XML and the streaming media infrastructure, this book considers recent features such as smilText and smilState, as well as the structuring, layout and timing aspects required to master SMIL. In addition, the book describes advanced SMIL functionality, including transitions, animation and embedded metadata, all from an application-oriented perspective.

The following topics form the core of the book's content:

• Web-Based multimedia
• Timing and synchronization
• Timed text (smilText) for labels, captions and subtitles
• Timed metadata
• Presentation layout
• Data-model-based SMIL State
• User accessibility
• Links and Hypermedia
• Multiple SMIL Profiles for Web, Mobile and Daisy applications

This book contains 20 chapters and 2 appendicies containing a wealth of information on the SMIL 3.0 language. In addition to the book's 146 illustrations and figures, it also contains dozens of examples of SMIL code in every common SMIL 3.0 profile.

The entire table of contents can be viewed here.

Three groups of readers are targetted by this book: web designers, SMIL player implementers and students of internet multimedia technology. You can judge if the content is right for you by reading the preface.

The 20 chapters and 2 appendicies in the book are divided into four sections:
      Part One: Introduction
      Part Two: Basic SMIL Constructs
      Part Three: Advanced SMIL Features
      Part Four: SMIL Family Reference
The book is printed in full color, with color illustrations in every section.

Please follow this link for a sample chapter: 9: Timed Text in SMIL.

Dick Bulterman is head of the Distributed Multimedia Languages and Infrastructures research group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national center for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam. He is also professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. From 1998-2001, he was managing director and CTO of Oratrix Development, a CWI spin-off company specializing in full-featured SMIL authoring systems and SMIL player engines. Bulterman received a Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1981. Dick Bulterman joined the W3C's Structured Multimedia (SYMM) working group in 1996. He was an active member of the SMIL 1.0 and SMIL 2.0 design teams, and was chair of the SYMM working group throughout the SMIL 3.0 development effort.

Lloyd Rutledge is an assistant professor with the Open Universiteit Nederland, where he specializes in Web technologies. Previously, he was a researcher with the Semantic Media Interfaces group at CWI. His research areas are Semantic Web user interaction, recommender systems and the semi-automatic generation of interactive multimedia presentations. He received his Sc.D in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1996. Lloyd Rutledge was part of the SYMM working group of the W3C, participating the development of SMIL 1.0 and 2.0.